In this post, I will break down what keeps us from becoming more productive and what we can start doing to be effective. Then in future posts, I will share more tips and techniques to set you up for becoming more effective in all areas of your life.

what keeps us from becoming more productive

too many distractions

I’ve written about this before. We are too distracted by so many things in our lives each day, especially with being constantly connected 24/7. That’s why I shared the one thing you can do to be drastically more productive. You can be less connected and be more selective of what you allow to distract you.

we don’t know what to focus on

One of the biggest things that prevent us from becoming more productive is that we don’t know what to focus on to achieve our goals. We have these big goals for our home, family or blog, but we lack the focus on what we need to do to become productive. To achieve our dreams and become productive, we need to figure out what to focus on.

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We try to do too much at once

Since we aren’t sure what to focus on and what is most important to achieve our goals. We start doing everything. We fill our days with lots of things to do and our lists are super long and we are trying to get done too much.

The problem, we will never get everything done and our days are busy. We aren’t becoming more productive this way, though. That’s why we need to learn to focus on what’s important. Stop this madness of doing too much.

How you can start becoming more productive

Now that we have a better idea of what is holding us back from becoming more productive in our lives it’s time to take some steps to fix those problems and learn what we need to do to start accomplishing more and becoming more productive in all areas of our lives. So let’s get started.

Focus all your attention on the most important task at the time

It’s time to get clear about what’s important. I’m sure you have a list of a bunch of things you need to get done, you want to get done and you’d like to get done. While that list is good and I’m sure you have the best of intentions, lots of it won’t get done.

Why? Because the key to really being productive is focusing on just one task at a time. Focusing on just one task allows you to work through it quickly and get it accomplished. This is why I am such a big fan of the Pomodoro method. Which you can read about here. So you have to stop trying to juggle a million things at once and start getting focused, finishing your tasks and moving through your list.

Figure out what is distracting you and figure out how to stop it

It’s also too easy to get caught up in distractions in your life and let them take up so much of your time that you don’t get things done. You will have your own set of distractions. We talked about turning off notifications because the constant beeps from our phones is a huge distraction.

There are other distractors of course. You need, to be honest with yourself and figure out yours. Maybe it’s TV or Facebook, texting, going out. There are lots of things we distract ourselves with that are unimportant. So look at how you spend your time and where you waste it. What can you do to eliminate or at least minimize those distractors? Mine was too much TV. I’m not going to give up watching TV because I enjoy it and it helps me feel less stressed.

Mine was too much TV. I’m not going to give up watching TV because I enjoy it and it helps me feel less stressed. So I learned that I had to plan when I watched it and not just have it on as background noise. I realized too often I would stop doing what needed to be done because I was watching.

Prioritize your to-do list

Another way to start becoming more productive is to prioritize your to-do list. All items on your list are not equal. There are some tasks that are more important to get done than others. So go through your to-do list and figure out what are the top tasks you need to do and get them done first.

I learned the process of getting the most important of my tasks done first and how to do that more effectively by reading the book Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy. If you are looking for great information on becoming more productive than this book is a great read for you. So check it out.

I hope you are now ready to start making some adjustments to your life in order to start becoming more productive. I know that once I made the effort to change some of my ways and began improving my level of productivity my life began to change. My blog began growing faster, my home looked better and I realized I could handle some big changes.

I had been stuck doing not enough for too long and that’s no longer good enough. So I’m constantly learning about becoming more productive to not only improve my own life but to share that information as well.