Never Getting Anything Done

Many people feel as if they don’t really get much done all week long, even though they are always busy. Thus, I will tell you about two techniques you can use to figure out whether you are not getting anything done because you are prone to get distracted, or because you do so much that it’s just too difficult to remember all of it.

First, let me tell you about a great idea I recently read about in the book Freedom Twenty-Five by Frost. In order to raise your awareness of how much time you actually spend on “just checking your email inbox,” and all those other activities you habitually do, he recommends making a list to record how many times you do all those little things. At the end of the day, you may be surprised how many dozen times you’ve checked your newsreader, wrote a text message, or had a peek at your email inbox.

This obviously does greatly affect your ability to concentrate on something, and greatly undermines your productivity. So, if you never get anything done, this little exercise hopefully sharpens your awareness. Just like someone who is literally addicted to playing video games may  make an attempt to change his habits once he realizes that he clocks in at 30 hours a week, someone being confronted with a piece of paper showing that he has checked his email more than one hundred times a day is probably going to think about some things as well.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have people who are very organized, and still sometimes have the uncanny feeling that they are not doing all that much. After all, when they come to work, their desk is almost empty, their email inbox not too full, and the tasks at hand rather manageable. However, because they are so good at organizing their day, they lose track of what they do. At the end of the day, their desk will look like it did in the morning, their email inbox does show a similar number of messages, and the to-do list has either grown a little, or shrunk.

Yet, because after a busy day the situation is so much like at the beginning, they think that they haven’t done much at all. To get rid of this feeling, you can spend one day at work, and record what you do. The number of calls you take, pages your write, emails you respond to, or whatever else you do, and suddenly you’ll see — it’s all fine!