Good intentions are only as good as the follow-through. How often do you start your workday convinced that you’ll be efficient, work on the right things, and wrap up on time, only to find that you haven’t lived up to your expectations by the end of it? It happens to us all.
You can stop yourself from derailing your day if you learn to spot the turning point. Here are five common things that even the most well-intentioned workers do that lead them off track:
1. You Keep Your Task List to Yourself
When you don’t tell others what you intend to work on, you have no accountability. That creates an environment where it’s easy for you to change your mind about which tasks to do and, therefore, get off track.
Share what you intend to do each day. Make your task list visible to others. Most collaboration apps, whether for communication, project management, or work management, create more transparency by default. Go the extra mile by telling your teammates and boss which tasks you will do each day. A simple one-line report in Slack is fine.
2. You Start Working On a Project Too Soon
Tackling a task too early, sometimes called precrastination, is a clear sign you’re not prioritizing effectively. It’s also a warning sign that you’re not doing your best work.
Precrastination is the opposite of procrastination. Instead of putting things off as procrastinators do, precrastinators have the mindset that they need to do every task immediately. That’s not an effective strategy.
If you find yourself jumping on every new task the moment it comes in, here’s one way to quell the impulse: Replace doing the task with writing it on your to-do list. That way, you force yourself to see the task in the context of everything else you need to do. Once it’s there, you can assign a date for the right time to work on it and get back to whatever you should be doing.
3. You React Immediately to Every Slack Message
Slack and Microsoft Teams can be just as disruptive to your work as email was in the early 2000s, and for the same reasons. A message comes in, and these systems (by design) make them seem urgent. As such, you feel like you need to check them immediately. Perhaps you decide not to respond right away, but you have to check.
When you react to every Slack or Teams message that comes in, you don’t engage in the uninterrupted, high-focus work that your company pays you to do.
If you can’t help but react, you should turn off notifications—or, at the very least, severely restrict them. They will be waiting for you the next time you switch to the Slack or Teams window. Better yet, get in the habit of quitting the application for 45 to 50 minutes at a time while you do high-focus work. When it’s time to take a short break, you can look at your messages
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