Is This Your Biggest Productivity Killer?

Over the past few weeks, I have become frustrated and unsatisfied that I haven’t been producing results, my website development was slow, and I felt busy all the time. My frustrations would translate into my internal dialogue as I am not good enough. Sounds familiar?

So I started to look at what was behind the lack of results. As I sat down and began to think about work and my personal time, family, and refurbishment we’re undergoing… I realized the true killer of my performance and productivity was the number of incompletions. 

What I mean by an incompletion is when you look around in your immediate environment, the incompletion is every single item that has you stop what you are doing now. The incompletions will often have you start drifting further away from what you were doing. Incompletion is every item starting with a thought or feeling like, “Oh, I forgot to do this or that.” Or, “I didn’t do this, I should do it sometimes,” or “l’ll need to do it soon,” and “l’d like to do it,” etc. 

I will assume (with fair certainty) that you also have items like this in your life. So the first step in dealing with incompletions is a daily habit: pick one incompletion at a time and complete it. I know it sounds simple and obvious. And yes, there is a but. 

My incompletion was that my calendar was a mess. When I sat down to deal with it, my brain shouted, “you must send an email to a client first; then you can make a plan and get organized.” This is just an example, but your brain will also give you many reasons why you shouldn’t complete what you just started. 

Starting a habit of completing things can be something simple. For example, you can begin to practise simple things like charging your AirPods. Or, you can throw away unnecessary papers on your desk, clean a dirty cup on your desk, or tick off one item from your to-do list that you have been dreading for weeks.

With many items, you will see that, shockingly, the things you have been avoiding for too long took very little time. And, you can verify the impact that incompletions have on you: there is a general sense of being proud of yourself and experiencing yourself as a bigger person when you complete something. Being powerful and alive is who each of us deep inside is. 

On Thursday, 17 November, I am opening a six-week course for those who are interested and feel the need to connect to what is really important for them and fearlessly take action to live a more satisfying life. Elevating productivity and getting more done every day will be just the cherry on top. I’ll share more with you soon!