5 Time Management Mistakes that Kill Productivity

Is your schedule out of control?

Are you trying and failing to manage your time at work?

Does a day or week go by, and you feel like you didn’t get anything done?

Most people want to be productive. We often feel extremely busy, but hours or even a whole day can pass without us feeling like we accomplished anything.

Productivity measures the amount of work you or your team can complete in a certain period. In the workplace, that period is your eight-hour workday. Time management and productivity are closely connected—if you manage your time effectively, you'll likely be more productive.

However, feeling that you didn't accomplish anything at the end of the day means your time management skills were off. While there will always be productivity-bashing events and circumstances out of your control, you will be consistently more productive if you avoid these time management mistakes.

Time Management Mistake #1: Letting Your Inbox Set Your Priorities

If you start your day by opening your inbox and responding to messages and requests in the order they arrive, you are letting your inbox dictate your priorities, and you'll lose hours to low-value tasks.

The average worker spends about three hours reading and responding to emails every day, and 70 percent open emails within six seconds. That means most of us are constantly checking our inboxes and reacting to whatever we find.

For years, time management experts have been advising us to timebox our email use—setting specific blocks of time to read and reply to messages, such as at the start and end of the day. However, we can't resist those email alerts. The boss might need something! By responding to emails as they come in, you set yourself up for a day full of distractions and reactive work, which hurts your productivity.

The typical worker receives 200 emails daily. If you believe email traffic is worsening, you're correct. Email volume increased by 30 percent in 2021. It's not just spam—in particular, not the malicious type. Sales and marketing teams have access to contact databases and social media advertising platforms that make it easy to reach out to strangers with their pitches.

What to Do Instead 

Take these steps to prevent email from controlling your day:

1. Make a to-do list for the next day at the end of your workday. End-of-day planning is a key component of the Ivy Lee Method, and it will help you start the next day with priorities in place.
2. Turn alerts off. Don't let the pings and notifications of new messages distract you from your work.
3. Check email at intervals. Timeboxing for email works wonders.

Time Management Mistake #2: Multitasking

Multitasking does not work. Let's say that again. Multitasking does not work, and this is not a matter of opinion. Research proves the myth of multitasking.

Numerous studies show that multitasking:

• Increases stress.
• Decreases productivity by up to 40 percent.
• Reduces your cognitive abilities.

Multitasking can create stress, decrease productivity, and harm your brain. If you are one of the 92 percent of people who, for example, check emails (that again!) and do other tasks in meetings, for instance, you need to stop.

Guess what? When you think you are multitasking, you’re not. "When we think we're multitasking, most often we aren't really doing two things at once, but instead, we're doing individual actions in rapid succession or task-switching," said neuropsychologist Cynthia Kubu, Ph.D.

It takes about 25 minutes to move between tasks. This is called "switching time," and it’s the time it takes to change your focus and return to whatever you were doing, then refocus on something else.

"The more we multitask, the less we actually accomplish because we gradually lose our ability to focus enough to learn," Kubu said. "If we're constantly trying to multitask, we don't practice tuning out the rest of the world to engage in deeper processing and learning."

What to Do Instead

Here are some ways you can kick the multitasking habit:

1. Divide your time into three 25-minute segments to focus on individual tasks, with a five-minute break in between. This is called the Pomodoro Technique.
2. Shut down your computer during in-person meetings and minimize unnecessary screens (such as email) during video calls.
3. Use your messaging app's (E.g., Slack) status to set a do-not-disturb when you want to focus on a task without interruption.

Time Management Mistake #3: Confusing the Urgent and Important Work

Former president and general Dwight Eisenhower famously said, "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." 

Getting caught up in urgent but unimportant work is a habit many of us fall into easily. Have you ever been asked to do an "emergency task" for someone, only to realize that no one even used your work? It was urgent for whoever asked for help, but it wasn’t really necessary.

Here is how to know if you are succumbing to "the tyranny of the urgent:"

• You put out fires all day.
• You are busy, but not fulfilling your core responsibilities.
• Your to-do list never gets written, let alone done.
• You do a lot for people other than your direct manager.
• You feel trapped by the reputation you built for never saying "no."

You are not alone. The brain is wired to prioritize urgency. Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that people often choose urgent tasks over important ones, even though the latter offer higher rewards. It is known as "The Mere Urgency Effect."

"Results from five experiments demonstrate that people are more likely to perform unimportant tasks (i.e., tasks with objectively lower payoffs) over important tasks (i.e., tasks with objectively better payoffs) when the unimportant tasks are characterized merely by spurious urgency."

What to Do Instead 

The best way to get focused on your most important work is by using the Eisenhower Matrix.

1. Steven Covey of "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" turned Eisenhower's quote into a decision-making matrix with four quadrants. It is called "The Eisenhower Matrix." The matrix is a valuable tool that can help you rewire your approach to work and life. Here is how it works:
   1. Upper left: Urgent and Important — must be done by you.
   2. Upper right: Important but not urgent — schedule it for later.
   3. Lower left: Urgent but not important — delegate to others.
   4. Lower right: Not important or urgent-don't do it at all.
   
   

   Important and urgent  Do it now	Important but not urgent  Schedule it
   Urgent but not important  Delegate it	Not important or urgent  Don't do it

    

2. Don't accept artificial deadlines. One of the reasons people tend to choose urgent tasks is because of "perceived expiration," the researchers found. If a deadline makes your heart race, question the consequences of missing it.
3. If you have a hard time identifying urgent and essential tasks, make a list of everything you did at the end of the day and assess the value of that work.

Time Management Mistake #4: Procrastination 

Just as we are wired to tackle urgent tasks first, we are also wired to put off unpleasant tasks. And like "The Mere Urgency Effect," researchers have identified why we procrastinate. Yes, people study this stuff. "Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem," said Dr. Tim Pychyl, who works with the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Call it what you want. Procrastination ruins productivity. Pychyl and his group call procrastination "the primacy of short-term mood repair … over the longer-term pursuit of intended actions." "Short-term mood repair" refers to the temporary relief we experience when we let ourselves off the hook.

We also get a boost from completing easy, more trivial tasks. Knocking easy work off your to-do list first thing feels good. But it also uses up the time of day when most people are at their peak in terms of energy and productivity. You know how it goes. Eventually, you feel guilty, stressed, and anxious when you procrastinate.

What to Do Instead 

To overcome procrastination, you can do what Mark Twain recommended: "Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day."

1. Eat the Frog! The name may sound funny, but it is a productivity system and book that teaches you to "stop procrastinating and get more done in less time."
2. Start small. Eat the frog's leg first. Sometimes, getting started on a dreaded task reveals that it is not as hard as you thought, and you get it done.
3. Ask for help or training. If you feel like you don't have the right skills for your job, ask a coworker for advice or consider taking a course to build your confidence.

Time Management Mistake #5: Doing Everything Yourself 

There are only 24 hours in a day. That will not change. That means there is only so much you can do on your own. Trying to do everything will limit your productivity and your career and business growth. 

Here are the reasons executives give for doing everything themselves, according to the Society for Human Resources Management:

• You want to save money by doing everything yourself.
• You think no one else can do something as well as you.
• You fear it will take too long to show someone else how to do something.
• You are a perfectionist and don't trust others to care as much about quality as you do.
• You want to be needed.
• You enjoy the work.
• You don't want to burden employees or associates with more work.
• You often struggle to say no.

If you insist on doing everything yourself, your business will be limited to the time you can spend on it. You also end up paying yourself to do tasks that could be outsourced at a lower cost.

A survey of 10,000 workers by Asana found that they spend more than half their time doing busy work instead of their core responsibilities. Asana refers to this as "work about work" rather than "work on work." Work about work is stuff like:

• Email management.
• Scheduling meetings.
• Searching for information.
• Updating project status.
• Planning travel and filing expenses.
• Invoicing and payment processing.

These are the tasks the Eisenhower Matrix would deem "urgent but not important" that you can offload to others.

What to Do Instead 

Delegate. "I would never have achieved what I did without learning the art of delegation," Virgin founder Richard Branson said. If you are trying to do everything yourself, you're likely not very good at delegating. Here are some tips to help you get started.

1. Use the Eisenhower Matrix to identify those tasks that are both urgent and important.
2. Automate what you can. Utilize software to automate tasks such as responding to online forms.
3. Hire a virtual assistant. A part-time remote assistant can do many administrative tasks. Asana allows you to outsource work at a much lower cost than paying yourself to do those tasks.

Supercharge Your Productivity 

Being busy but unproductive is no fun. If you are making these time management mistakes, your schedule is out of control, and it doesn't have to be that way.

As with most challenges we face, the first step is admitting you have a problem. If your problem is time management, the tools and tips listed here will help you get organized, focus your time on the most critical work, and supercharge your productivity.

There is no better time to get started.

About the Author: Bill is Prialto's senior content marketing manager and writes about the future of work and how businesses can be more productive and successful. His work has appeared in the World Economic Forum Agenda blog and CIO magazine.