5 Painfully Obvious Mistakes That Will Kill Your Progress in 2024
The start of a new year means it’s time to cut the bad habits!
Cutting your bad habits is the best way to see exponential progress in your life.
Your bad habits create mistakes. Mistakes compound into bad results over time. They may only seem like something little now but the effects snowball quickly.
That’s not the worst part though… A lot of the mistakes that happen are hard to pick up on! You don’t realize how much they are hurting your life until you’ve created a mountain to climb.
I have good news for you though!
If you stop these mistakes today, you will see great progress in 2024.
Are you ready?
1. Multitasking
Let’s cut to the chase… Multitasking does not work.
It takes your brain about 15 minutes to adjust when you’re switching tasks. So, while you think you can read a book and watch a TV show at the same time, you really can’t. By the end of it, you won’t know what happened in your TV show or what you read.
“But, I’m different.”
No, you’re not. One study found that only 2.5% of people can multitask effectively.
Now, I don’t know you, but I do know probabilities… and I would bet that you’re not part of that 2.5%.
If you want to be:
Productive
Successful
Efficient
and I’m assuming you’re reading this because you do, stop multitasking.
Flip your phone upside down and put it on silent.
Turn the TV off.
And focus on one thing at a time.
2. Putting work off until later
Procrastination is the best way to NOT get anything done. We’ve all been guilty of putting off work till later.
And then later comes around and we still don’t do the work or you just do it horribly because you are rushed.
If you want to be productive, you have to do what you have to do and you have to do it now.
I hope you like that wordplay.
The issue arises when you’re doing work that you don’t want to do in the first place. That’s why you keep putting it off until later.
That means that the best way to stop procrastinating is to find work you love. Either that or you have to find the discipline.
The best-case scenario is you find both.
Then you’re golden.
3. You keep looking for the easy way to do things
No matter how much you procrastinate, unfortunately, there will always be things that you have to do, that you don’t want to do.
That’s when most of us try to find the easy, or quick way to do things.
Don’t do that.
The easy way out typically winds up making work harder on you in the long run.
It may mean you do a bad job, or it may mean you’re actually just procrastinating again and then you end up with more work down the road.
Just do what you have to do and do it now.
4. Not organizing your schedule properly
One of the greatest productivity hacks is time-blocking or “batching” your tasks. If you’re great with your calendar, you probably already do this, but a lot of people lack this important skill.
You need to be able to organize your week and block sections of time so that you can focus on the most important tasks in one go.
If you simply have 2 hours a day to get a bunch of tasks done, you’re going to be scrambling around and then probably fall into the mistake of trying to multitask again.
Instead, you should decide which tasks to prioritize, schedule them into time blocks that work, and solely focus on that task during that time.
This technique becomes even more effective when you do it throughout your week, instead of just day to day.
For example, Tim Ferriss in The 4-Hour Work Week mentioned that he blocks off a time once a week where he would check his email. This helped him become incredibly productive and efficient.
Most people would find this rather impossible, and maybe that’s the case. But, there are many tasks you could do this with.
To maximize productivity, you’ve got to maximize the quality of your schedule.
5. Taking on too much work
You are:
Awesome
Talented
And Smart
But, everyone has a maximum workload they can take on themselves.
And yes, I know, you want to make sure the job is done right, so it’s best if you just do it yourself.
But, the job won’t get done right if your brain is melting.
Sometimes the best way of improving productivity is to outsource or to delegate. If you have employees, you can delegate, but if you don’t, you can also outsource and find others to help you.
There are numerous places where you can hire someone to help with your workload for cheap.
Fiverr
Upwork
VA Agencies like Sheppard
Alternatively, there are always local contractors you can reach out to.
To maximize your productivity, your brain and body have to be at peak performance when you are working on your most important tasks. So, don’t waste too much energy trying to take on everything.
This is a skill that isn’t easily learned, but when you do learn it, you will see exponential progress take place.
Closing remarks
By fixing these awful mistakes (that most of us are guilty of) you can ensure that 2024 is your most productive year ever!
By increasing productivity and cutting bad habits, you’re bound to see meaningful progress that lasts.
You may not see the progress at first, but over time, you’ll notice a major improvement.
Simply put: the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll see progress.
So, let’s make 2024 the year that you became a productivity machine!
Thanks for reading