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Let’s get back to this week’s thought!

There are several different ways that our productivity gets decreased. And the worst thing is if we don’t even notice it. This happened to me a lot of times before. I was thinking that I was being productive by doing some things. But at the end of the day, I got nothing done.

We need to keep in mind that being busy does not equal to being productive.

In this article we will go over the top 3 biggest productivity killers for me and what my approach is to minimizing the effect of them on me. Let’s start with the first one.

I have been dealing with perfectionism for a long time without even knowing. Wanting to make things amazingly well, but never finishing them.

I have especially observed myself doing this when I was doing something visual. For example, designing something. It never looked right to me. The colors, the font combination, the layout, etc. I've also had similar issues with coding.

As an engineer, I often wanted to write code that was the best possible. A lot of times that meant that it was never good enough. How I am naming variables, making abstractions or how I am solving particular problems - it was never good enough for me.

As a manager, I often found myself waiting for the perfect moment to do something. For example, give certain feedback or discuss a certain issue with the team. That brought quite a lot of problems, as things were not getting better. Do you have/did you have a similar issue? If that’s so, would love to hear in the comments.

What works for me?

Whenever I find myself perfecting, there are three things that I keep in my mind:

Progress is much more important than perfection.Waiting for perfect moments causes more issues than actually doing it when it’s not.95% is often good enough for the majority of cases. 100% does not exist.

That shifts my mind and gets me back to making progress!

I have found myself procrastinating a lot of times before and I sometimes find myself now as well (I even procrastinated a bit with writing this article).

I believe that everyone deals with this to an extent. Some people more, some people less. I especially noticed that when I first started to work fully remotely. Getting in the zone is easier for me in the office than at home.

The ability to get things done is very important. I believe it’s one of the most important abilities for both engineers and managers.

Not getting things done is not only bad for the team, but it also takes a big toll on yourself. It can cause quite a lot of stress and can also ultimately lead to burnout.

What works for me?

Eat that frog: I focus on finishing the hardest task first thing in the morning (If I do morning exercise, then right after). I have the most energy in the morning and if I get it done, other tasks become much easier to finish. I suggest a book called: “Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time” by Brian Tracy.I try to find small wins everywhere. That tends to help me to increase my drive and motivation to finish the next tasks. Once you get the momentum, things become much easier!I don’t focus on perfect timings anymore. I rather focus on achieving daily and weekly goals. For example, a daily goal of mine is to post on LinkedIn and Twitter (X) and a weekly goal is to create a newsletter article. It doesn’t matter if I create the article on Tuesday, or if I have it already done. As long as the article gets sent out on Sunday, I have achieved my goal.“Just DO it” attitude helps a lot. Sometimes we are all overthinking things. Once you get started, the momentum is going to help you to progress.

Many times we are interrupted or distracted by a certain thing like changing priorities, meetings or we just lose focus.

As an engineer, I felt that heavily when requirements changed in the middle of implementing a task or a certain meeting just randomly appeared on my calendar.

I needed a lot of time to get back in the zone and to remember everything I had done before. Sometimes I also just got distracted and started doing something completely different, which didn’t produce the best results as well.

The thing is that you just can’t avoid context-switching, because it’s also very important that you are there for your colleagues when help is needed. There are certain ways to minimize it and to manage it. I believe it will be a never-ending process for me to improve on this.

As a manager, I am now doing a LOT more context-switching daily, and I have gotten a lot better at it. It took a lot of time to get better at it, but I don’t just rely on this. I now have a better overview and organization of my time, than I did before.

What works for me?

Timeboxing of tasks (Pomodoro technique) - A timer with 25 min of focus work and 5 min pause works for me to keep me focused on what I wish to achieve. You can be amazed at how much you can achieve by just being focused and sticking to one task until you finish it.Meeting time and maker time - I try to reserve my time and combine similar things together. For example: 4 hours for meetings and 4 hours for focus work. A good thing to do is to also block your time in the calendar (Focus time), so everyone knows not to book meetings at this time.Break down bigger tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks. That ensures that you can finish the tasks faster. It’s also great for everyone reviewing the code. Small tasks normally mean a lot smaller changes in code and that also means faster reviews and ultimately faster merging of PRs.

Additionally,

wrote a great article about context-switching. You can also find strategies for managing context-switching in there. You can read the article here: It takes 23 mins to recover after an interruption.

Whenever I hear that you need to be good at multi-tasking to be successful, I just find that to be bad advice for me. Maybe for some people it’s different, but I don’t operate that way.

If I am trying to simultaneously focus on finishing 2, 3 or even more tasks at the same time, I can just feel my energy being drained from it. I then need a longer break to recharge.

I am also a big believer in preserving your energy and using it strategically throughout the day. If you use all your energy by doing multi-tasking in the morning, there will be nothing left for the afternoon.

Unfortunately, it's unavoidable to some extent, e.g. you are blocked or you are waiting for something, but minimizing it as much as possible is important for me.

What works for me:

Don’t read Slack messages or emails while you are focusing on finishing your task. A lot of times, there will be a response needed and you will want to respond to that message. If you don’t respond immediately, you will keep it in your head, which takes some of the energy from you. Finish the task first and only after -> check your messages and emails.A lot of advice that you can read above works to avoid multi-tasking as well. You have limited mental energy every day, make sure to use it for the RIGHT things. What I suggest is to be cautious and preserve it as much as possible. Getting many things done consistently is a lot better than getting a lot of things done sporadically and then needing a long time to recharge.

What are your top productivity killers? I would love to hear from you. Either here in the comments or you can also send me an email or DM me on LinkedIn or Twitter (X). I have also recently started to post daily on Twitter (X). Make sure to follow me there, if you don’t already.

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