People associated with online journalism and professional blog writing will relate to this. While experienced ones may have already found a way out, many beginners might not even be aware of the hindrances that affect their online productivity. They start putting exhaustive efforts to better their figures but hardly do they know what’s causing the real trouble. Based on my personal experiences, here are 5 major things that bring your enthusiasm, and hence productivity, down.
1) Social Media
Yes. Paradoxical, but yes. You sit in front of your computer, prepping yourself for some real work, but you keep your Twitter client and Facebook running in background. Yes, you are following some awesome people on Twitter and hope to receive the last minute update so that you can tweak your work (let’s say a blogpost) accordingly. But this affects the quality of your work bigtime. Anything that you do requires ‘focus’. And the lack of it causes mediocre quality work which leads to bad productivity. As simple as that. Close these applications and use them later to promote your stuff.
2) Analysis
“Too much analysis leads to paralysis”. I have seen people analysing (or simply checking out) their Google PR, Alexa rankings, number of incoming links to their blog, their adsense earnings, analytics, Twitter mentions, ‘Likes’ and comments on their FB fanpage almost a dozen times in a day. While it’s a great ego booster to see those graphs go up and down, it seriously affects your work. I have a rule of thumb – analyse anything and everything only in the last half an hour of your day, just before packing up.
3) Keeping an eye on competitors…all the time!
See, it’s a human nature to consider only those people as your competitors who are slightly ahead of you in the game. Always. Once you surpass them, your subconscious mind removes them from the list to add new competitors. So at any given time, you feel like you are behind someone else. Now, in a way it’s a good thing that keeps you motivated. But keeping a close eye on their progress all the time makes you feel less confident about yourself. You try to follow their exact footsteps and become less creative. Here you need to give importance to your intuition about what you want to achieve and how you will achieve it. Only then, your productivity will show some rise.
4) Choosing the wrong time
No, it’s not about working at the most suitable time of the day when you feel energetic and enthusiastic. It’s about being smart. It’s about analysing the rush of internet users at different times. Often, people do not study the internet properly and then crib about not getting enough exposure. If you are publishing something online, make sure you do that in the peak hours when the traffic is huge. Your content is more likely to be picked up then. Publishing something important at 3AM or on weekends will obviously get unnoticed. Try to spread your best works on weekdays, just before noon. Avoid Saturday evenings at all costs. Keep in mind that even if you work hard for the whole day, but it doesn’t get noticed, your productivity still remains zero.
5) More than necessary sources of information
It is quite obvious that people tend to stuff in as many news and information feeds in their feed-readers trying to get the most of it. But before you can even realise, you would have made an information hodgepodge. You try to extract relevant information from it and before you make any sense out of it, you feel exhausted and frustrated. Your productivity suffers. I tend to analyse my feeds every month or so and keep those blog feeds which provide a particular information at the earliest. The rest with almost the same story, I remove them.
So these are the hindrances to productivity that I experienced and my views to tackle them. What hindrances do you face? Share your thoughts
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