3 (Probably) Surprising Things That Affect Productivity

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Picture this. You’ve just arrived at work. You sit at your desk. You start your computer, ready to tackle that complex report. First, you log in and check your email, and glance at the news app on your phone. A headline catches your eye, so you continue scrolling. Before you know it, you find yourself reading an article about quiet quitting. By the time you’ve skim-read that piece, it’s 20 minutes after you hoped to begin the report, and you’ll be lucky to make any real progress before a new email hits your inbox that needs answering, or a colleague comes over to you with a question or request.

Sound familiar? Read How to Manage Your Inbox Like a Pro for some tips on how to better deal with email.

Digital distractions abound in modern life, and it’s not just email that can throw you off, there are countless other sources of distraction, too. Each distraction steals our time, lessens our focus, and damages our productivity. We can often feel connected, thanks to notifications, email and alerts. The problem is, we don’t always have the right information, and when we do, it is not often delivered at the right time.

In the rest of this piece, we’ll explore 3 surprising things affecting productivity, and recommend some apps to help with motivation and productivity at work. Before we get on to that though, it’s necessary to touch upon why we lose focus in the first place. If you want more detail, see ‘Why Do We Struggle to Focus’. Now though, let’s get into it.

Why Do We Find It Hard to Stay on Task?

Here are a few simple reasons why staying focused in the face of distractions can so often prove difficult.

• We are biased in favour of action, and we have the desire to feel busy, even if, by being constantly busy, we achieve less.
• Our self-control is finite, not inexhaustible.
• We crave the dopamine hit and rewards offered by all the distractions around us, like social media.

Next, we’ll look at each of these psychological factors in a little more detail.

3 Key Psychological Factors Affecting Productivity

What do we mean when we say we prefer to do things rather than to do nothing, have limited reserves of self-control, and have brains that seek rewards from the distractions surrounding us?

Let’s find out.

We’re Biased in Favour of Action

This psychological bias is evident everywhere, not just in the workplace. It’s why people text while composing emails at work, or look things up while watching TV. The trouble is, multitasking like this has a startingly effect on our productivity, reducing it by as much as 40%. Not only that, but you can also actually decrease your IQ by up to 10 points.

Our brains aren’t designed to multitask. What we’re doing instead is rapid task-switching which incurs a cognitive and attentional cost.

There is another reason we tend to favour action. We can use action to procrastinate. Procrastination gets a bad rap. It’s often misrepresented as laziness or a lack of motivation. In fact, humans procrastinate to cope with challenging or unpleasant tasks. We opt to do something fun to give ourselves a boost, instead of having to confront a more challenging task. This isn’t a good idea though, as it can lead to a cycle of ongoing procrastination which can be hard to break out of, and we all know how procrastination can damage productivity.

We Have Finite Self-Control

Can’t we just exercise self-control to ignore all those pesky notifications and alerts, and thereby preserve our productivity? Yes, but only up to a point. We have only a certain amount of self-control.

Ignoring those notifications and alerts and resisting the urge to jump on social media temporarily depletes our reserves of willpower. Our control over our emotions, thoughts and behaviours diminishes for a time.

Ultimately, that means that, while you might be able to ignore a few pings early in the workday, disregarding them will get more difficult as the day goes on, and you are likely to get distracted at some point, which is bound to have a detrimental effect on your productivity.

Our Brains Crave Dopamine and Other Psychological Rewards

Our brains crave the rewards offered by social media and other sources of distraction. Such distractions as those offered by the internet stimulate the production of two ‘reward’ chemicals in the brain — dopamine and oxytocin.

Dopamine drives us to seek novelty and thus makes us curious about the flow of information we’re exposed to. Oxytocin is known to be important in creating feelings of trust, love, compassion, and intimacy. We get a boost from every post, comment, like, or share we get on social media. It makes us feel good, so we continue to crave more and seek further exposure.

What to Do to Remain Productive

Here are the best tips we could come up with to help you confront factors damaging your efficiency so you can stay productive.

• Be aware of your habits, your tendency to procrastinate, and why you do it.
• Set yourself goals and then begin your tasks. There is no need to finish them, just make a start. Making progress, even a little, helps keep us motivated to continue and makes us less likely to feel helpless.
• Meditating and ensuring you get a good night’s sleep helps replenish our reserves of self-control and willpower. You can also use apps to help you stay focused, as we will see in the next section.
• Eating healthy can also help boost your willpower.
• You can use apps to block certain distraction-filled websites.
• Use time-blocking to create dedicated portions of time you can devote to any given task to avoid multitasking.
• Automate repetitive tasks using tools like Zapier to save both time and energy.

Now it’s time to talk about apps you can use to stay motivated and productive at work.

6 Best Apps to Help You Stay Focused and Productive

The secret to remaining motivated and productive is to spend more time working on things that matter. Focus on high-value tasks, and find ways to eliminate, delegate, or minimise repetitive and mundane tasks that drain your energy, waste time, and erode motivation.

These are some examples of apps you can use to help you do just that. There is a multitude of apps out there, but we will look at ones that help you deal with different habits that may be affecting your productivity.

RescueTime

You can use RescueTime to help figure out where you’re wasting time by tracking what you do during a typical workday. Based on the data collected, you can work out ways to use your time more efficiently by calculating the times of the day when you’re at your most productive.

Boomerang

Do you have trouble resisting the urge to constantly check your email? This can be a time sink that takes a massive toll on your productivity. Inbox Pause is a key feature of the Boomerang app. It allows you to:

• Block incoming emails for a time, so you can focus on a task without distractions for a set period.
• Change the settings so certain messages can get through the block, (such as ones from your boss or manager) so you don’t miss crucial messages that may need a fast response.

TextExpander

This is an app that can help you deal with your email in a different way so you can minimise distractions. If you often spend time answering the same questions repeatedly, you can use TextExpander to:

• Create templates you can insert into emails to answer frequently asked questions super-fast.
• Insert the templates in an instant by assigning a keyboard shortcut to each of them.  

Engross

Want a way to block out all distractions for a time, so you can get into a state of flow and be highly productive? Why not use the Pomodoro timer app, Engross.

Calculate your chronotype, then schedule your most vital work during the hours in which you’re most alert and productive. Next, use Engross to break your day down into 25-minute segments with a 5-minute break between each one. After you cycle through about 4 25-minute Pomodoros, you should take a longer break. If you are going through a 25-minute period of focus and find yourself becoming distracted, click the button in the Engross app to record the distraction. Later, you can use that data to work out when you typically work well and are at your most focused.

Wrike

If you use too many apps, it can actually end up hindering productivity. You could lose significant amounts of time every day just by logging into, managing, and using numerous apps.

Wrike gives you a place where you can perform a variety of tasks you would usually need many apps for.

In Wrike, you can:

• Organise files.
• Manage projects.
• Manage your time and budget.
• Collaborate with others, using easy integration with other platforms and apps.

And much more besides.

Zapier

Want to stop wasting time on those mindless, repetitive tasks that seem to take up the lion’s share of your day?

Use Zapier to automate tasks and save a bundle of time. Zapier allows you to automate simple tasks by connecting the various apps you use to complete your work.

You can:

• Automatically post things to social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
• Transfer data onto spreadsheets with no need to copy and paste.
• Automatically flag or star emails you want to pay the most attention to.

You can do many other things with this app. For further details, check out, ‘Automation: How to Make the Most of Your Zaps’.

Wrapping Up

We’ve covered 3 surprising things that affect productivity, from our tendency to favour action to our limited self-control and our ceaseless search for rewards and novelty. Hopefully, you now have a better idea of what to do to become more productive. Why not try out one of the apps we recommend here to help you on that quest? You might be surprised by the results.

Thanks for reading.

Want to learn more about cognitive biases? Read ‘5 More Cognitive Biases That Influence Efficiency’.