Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. 
They never have learned that insights become effective only through hard systematic work.
Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.

Brilliance Vs Hard Work

If one cannot increase the supply of a resource, one must increase its yield. And effectiveness is the one tool to make the resources of ability and knowledge yield more and better results.Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.

Effectiveness: Better Results

If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away simply“operating.” He may be excellent but is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved.What the executive needs are criteria that enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the criteria are not found in the flow of events.

The Flow Of Events

What seems to be wanted is universal genius, and universal genius has always been in scarce supply. The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.Therefore, we have to staff our organizations with people who at best excel in one of these abilities. And then they are more than likely to lack any but the most modest endowment in the others.

The Universal Incompetent

<ol><li>Effective executives are time-oriented.</li><li>Effective executives focus on outward contribution and results rather than effort.</li><li>Effective executives build on strengths— their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation.</li><li>Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.</li><li>Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system— of the right steps in the right sequence.</li></ol>

Five Habits Of The Effective Executive

<ul><li dir = "auto">Effective executives do not start with their tasks.&nbsp;</li><li dir = "auto">They start with their time.&nbsp;</li><li dir = "auto">They do not start out with planning.&nbsp;</li><li dir = "auto">They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time.&nbsp;</li><li dir = "auto">Finally, they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units.</li></ul>Time is the most valuable resource, as one can hire great people but cannot rent, hire, buy or obtain more time.

Managing Time

<ul><li dir = "auto">The first step toward executive effectiveness is therefore to record actual time-use.</li><li dir = "auto">Systematic time management is therefore the next step.</li><li dir = "auto">One has to find the nonproductive, time-wasting activities and get rid of them if one possibly can.</li><li dir = "auto">This requires asking oneself a number of diagnostic questions.</li></ul>Effective executives have learned to ask systematically and without coyness: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask this question, and to ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive.

The First Step

To ask, “What can I contribute?” is to look for the unused potential in the job. And what is considered excellent performance in a good many positions is often but a pale shadow of the job’s full potential of contribution.”Every organization needs performance in three major areas: It needs direct results; building of values and their reaffirmation; and building and developing people for tomorrow.

The Team Contribution

&quot;He always, at the end of his meetings, goes back to the opening statement and relates the final conclusions to the original intent.&quot;

<ul><li>The one secret of effectiveness is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.</li><li>This is the “secret” of those people who “do so many things” and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.</li><li>Effective executives do not race. They set an easy pace but keep going steadily.</li></ul>

Secrets Of Effectiveness

One can be an effective executive by:<ul><li>Recording where the time goes.</li><li>Focusing your vision on contribution.</li><li>Making your strengths productive and focus on using them.</li><li>Prioritizing the most important things first, not necessarily the most urgent.</li><li>Taking rational action.</li></ul>

Learning Effectiveness

The measure of the executive, Peter Drucker reminds us, is the ability to 'get the right things done'. Usually this involves doing what other people have overlooked, as well as avoiding what is unproductive. He identifies five talents as essential to effectiveness, and these can be learned; in fact, they must be learned just as scales must be mastered by every piano student regardless of his natural gifts. Intelligence, imagination and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that convert these into results. One of the talents is the management of time. Another is choosing what to contribute to the particular organization. A third is knowing where and how to apply your strength to best effect. Fourth is setting up the right priorities. And all of them must be knitted together by effective decision-making. How these can be developed forms the main body of the book. The author ranges widely through the annals of business and government to demonstrate the distinctive skill of the executive. He turns familiar experience upside down to see it in new perspective. The book is full of surprises, with its fresh insights into old and seemingly trite situations.

Stashed ideas

The Effective Executive

The planning fallacy is the likelihood to underestimate the time it will take to finish a future task despite knowing that similar projects have taken longer in the past. For example, writers underestimate how long it will take to complete a novel; product managers miscalculate how long a new feature will take to build.
Studies show that we underestimate how long it will take even when we know we&#39;re likely to underestimate timelines.

The planning fallacy

Time Management

<ul><li>Break projects down into smaller pieces and estimate how long each part will take.</li><li>Add 20% to your estimated completion time. It is better to plan for the unexpected than to be surprised by it.</li><li>Use historical data to make better predictions. Don't think you'll be able to finish faster next time.</li><li>Limit the scope of work. Instead of extending the timeline, reduce the scope of work.</li><li>Communicate early and often if you're going to miss a deadline.</li></ul>

Overcoming the planning fallacy

Our tendency to underestimate the time it will take to complete a future task despite knowing that similar tasks have taken longer in the past.

Why we're so bad at setting realistic timelines, and how to get better at it (maybe)

The next time your boss asks why you missed a deadline, blame it on your brain.

The Planning Fallacy refers to our tendency to underestimate the time it will take to complete a future task despite knowing that similar tasks have taken longer in the past. Contractors underestimate how much time renovations will take. Writers underestimate the amount of time they’ll need to complete a novel. Product managers underestimate how long a new feature will take to build. Elon Musk misses Tesla production timeline after Tesla production timeline. (When asked about his penchant for giving wildly inaccurate predictions, Musk <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-blames-missed-model-3-production-targets-stupidity-2018-12" rel="noopener noreferrer">replied </a>“People should not ascribe to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity.”)

Worse still, multiple studies show that we underestimate timelines even when we know we’re likely to underestimate timelines .

The Planning Fallacy can be a great thing. How many projects would we never have taken on if we had an accurate understanding of how much work and time would be required at the start? Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. But most of the time, committing to overly optimistic deadlines just leads to a lot of unnecessary stress and guilt.

We can’t meet deadlines, but we can’t get anything done without them (see <a dir="ltr" href="https://blog.doist.com/mere-urgency-effect-comic/" rel="noopener">the Mere Urgency Effect </a>), so how do we learn to live with them?

Break projects down into smaller parts and estimate how long each will take . The more granular you can be in your project planning, the more realistic your time estimates tend to be. It’s easy for me to say, “Sure, I can absolutely get that draft to you in 2 days”, but when I break down how many words per hour that would require, it becomes obviously unrealistic.

Pad your schedules more than you think you need to . Whatever you think is a reasonable project timeline, pad the schedule with 20%. As you’re planning your week, pretend Friday (20% of the work week) doesn’t exist. If you get to Friday with everything complete, great! You can spend that time learning or working on a side project or getting ahead on the next thing. But more likely than not, the work you planned for four days will end up spilling over into the fifth. It’s better to plan for it than be surprised by it.

Use historical data to make better predictions . Start tracking the time it takes you to actually complete things, and use that historical data to make more accurate predictions. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ll be able to finish it faster next time. Use a time tracking tool like <a dir="ltr" href="https://toggl.com/track/todoist-time-tracking/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Toggl </a>that integrates with several task managers, including Todoist, so you can start your timer right from your task lists.

Limit the scope of work . At Doist, we work in four-week project cycles. While we’ve gotten <a dir="ltr" href="https://blog.doist.com/doist-objectives/" rel="noopener">better at planning our work over the years </a>, projects can still fall behind. Instead of extending the timeline, our project squads have started reducing the scope of work mid-cycle. This way, even when we fall victim to the Planning Fallacy, our squads still ship high-quality work that will deliver value for <a dir="ltr" href="https://todoist.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Todoist </a>and <a dir="ltr" href="https://twist.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Twist </a>users, even if it means leaving off some things for a later version.

When you’re going to miss a deadline, communicate that early and often . No matter how careful you are, you will inevitably find yourself with a looming deadline and no chance of meeting it. If you’re anything like me, your first instinct will be to stick your head in the sand and avoid thinking about it (see “Present Bias” below). But that just makes everything worse. The earlier you can let people know, the better they’ll be able to adjust their own plans. Most people are understanding. Even when they’re not, they’ll be a whole lot more understanding than if you told them you’d be missing a deadline after the fact.

The Planning Fallacy

Being productive is not about doing more. It is about doing things efficiently.
You have the same number of hours in the day as successful authors, musicians, entertainers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. Investing time in some simple strategies and making small changes can help you get more out of your day.

Being productive means being efficient

Research found we get 22% less work done when we have a meeting coming up in the next hour or two.
Consider creating rules around your schedule. Batching emails, calls, meetings, or virtual events can leave a longer timespan for you to focus on work without distractions.

Batch your meetings

A study found that most people lose about two seconds per minute of work using their mouse instead of keyboard shortcuts. That amounts to eight days a year.
Learning keyboard shortcuts can increase your productivity. Most software shares the same shortcuts - learning a few shortcuts will make you faster.

Keyboard shortcuts for productivity

Small behavioural hacks can assist in better working habits and lead to huge payoffs.
Consider what habits you want to change, then modify your environment to support those behaviours. For example, if you want to read more, keep books or your kindle next to your bed and put your phone further away. If you want to check social media less often, delete those apps from your phone.

Setting better work habits

We are all writers. Our success at work or school is partly determined by our ability to communicate through email, reports, projects, and maybe articles or books.
Reading your work out loud makes it easier to test if it sounds right. It helps to make your writing clearer, exact, and more impactful.

Read your work out loud

Job and life advice for young professionals. See more from Ascend <a dir="ltr" href="https://hbr.org/insight-center/ascend">here </a>.

In 2018, I came across a <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.fasthorseinc.com/blog/2018/07/you-have-the-same-amount-of-hours-in-a-day-as-beyonce-and-other-terrible-sayings/">meme </a>that was going viral on the Internet. It read, “You have the same number of hours in the day as Beyoncé.” I doubt that anyone became more productive or achieved greater heights as a result of these words, but it made me wonder: Do high achievers approach their days and their work differently than most people? How do they become so efficient and productive?

To explore this question, I set out to interview a number of rock star authors, musicians, entertainers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders for my podcast, <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.amanthaimber.com/podcast">How I Work </a>. I spoke to them about their routines, rituals, practices, and work hacks to understand how they get so much more done (even during the pandemic) than your average person.

Batch checking emails has become a common productivity tip. The idea is that you only look at your inbox two to three times a day or pause notifications for a period of time so that you can focus on work without distractions.

Batching meetings, calls, or virtual events can be equally effective. <a dir="ltr" href="https://academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jcr/ucy043/4996321?redirectedFrom=fulltext">Research </a>from Ohio State University has shown that when we have a meeting coming up in the next hour or two, we get 22% less work done compared to when we have no upcoming meetings at all.

Think about it. What do you find yourself doing before a Zoom call with your professor, a virtual team update, or a one-on-one meeting with your boss? You’re most likely thinking about what you’re going to say, deliberating questions, or rehearsing some kind of a presentation. It’s hard to get into flow when you know you have a major interruption around the corner.

Wharton Professor Adam Grant told me he’s found a way around this. “On a teaching day, I hold all my office hours in the same general time frame,” he said. “I schedule a five-minute buffer between each just to catch up on email and to have a safety net in case a meeting runs long. Other days, I have no meetings at all and can really focus and be productive.”

Consider creating rules around your own schedule. If you are most alert in the mornings, try to schedule your most demanding tasks and meetings early on, and leave the afternoons open for some quiet work hours.

A study by <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.brainscape.com/blog/2011/08/keyboard-shortcuts-economy/">Brainscape </a>found that most people lose an average of two seconds per minute of work by using their mouse instead of keyboard shortcuts. That’s eight days a year! The benefits of learning keyboard shortcuts can be enormous for your productivity. Fortunately, most software shares the same shortcuts, meaning the more you learn, the faster you will become across the board. Here are <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.lifewire.com/best-mac-shortcuts-4172652">a few </a>to get you started.

“I almost never ever touch the mouse,” Rahul Vohra, founder of <a dir="ltr" href="https://superhuman.com/?utm_source=google&amp;utm_medium=cpc&amp;utm_campaign=20200918_brandedsearch&amp;utm_term=superhuman&amp;utm_content=a&amp;gclid=CjwKCAiAwrf-BRA9EiwAUWwKXl719e_DeYWyyDN6i0jp9AWqKTDLDkKX6YSfxGtutAtUMhdBcxtjMxoC71AQAvD_BwE">Superhuman </a>(an email software that claims to provide the fastest email experience in the world) told me. “And that’s a rule that I abide by, not just for how we built Superhuman, but in almost every piece of software I use,” Vohra said.

If you’re trying to set better work habits, Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and Automattic, told me that small behavioral hacks can lead to the biggest payoffs. “If what is closest to my bed when I wake up is the Kindle and not the phone, I’m more likely to read,” said Mullenweg. “But if the phone’s on top of the Kindle I’m more likely to look at the phone.”

In other words, consider what habits you want to change and think about how you can alter your environment to influence those behaviors. For instance, you’ve probably heard that turning off your phone or putting it on airplane mode will help you stay more focused on work. In the same way, making small altercations to your surrounding can inspire you to act on things that you’ve been avoiding or don’t naturally want to do.

If you want to read more, lay a stack of books in every room. If you want to cut out junk food, hide your sweets beneath the apples in the fruit bowl so that every time you have a craving, you’re presented with a healthier option first. If you want to check social media less often, delete or offload those apps from your phone. If you want to avoid checking emails all day, pause your inbox so you’re not distracted by every new notification.

What Super Productive People Do Differently

A process of performing “professional activities…in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” - Cal NewportHistorically, psychologists used to refer to deep work as “being in the flow."

What Deep Work Is

The non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted, tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Shallow work

...is the first element of deep work.That means you won’t have the mental discipline to stay concentrated on a single task unless you prepare your mind and environment to it.

Recognizing our limited willpower

&quot;The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.&quot;

Quote

<ol><li>Develop a deep work schedule and routine:&nbsp;A systematic way of getting in that deep work mindset is to develop a routine in which you always perform the task in the same place and time, for a given time frame.</li><li>Work on what matters:&nbsp;At the end of the day, you should be acting like an executive, working towards your goals in a professional, consistent manner.</li><li>Accept laziness:&nbsp;While the results should lead to higher productivity levels, your ultimate goal is to have more time for yourself. Enjoy your “lazy” time".</li></ol>

Organize Your Deep Work

<ol><li>Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours</li><li>Find your lag&nbsp;(the goal you’re trying to achieve)&nbsp;and lead metrics&nbsp;(the behaviors you’ll do to reach the goal)</li><li>Develop a scoreboard where you track your time spend in a state of deep work</li><li>Analyze the results and be accountable for the results, always working to hit the metrics you had previously identified</li></ol>

To work on what matters...

&nbsp;... is all about&nbsp;taking your existing time spent working and concentrating it to make the most out of it.&nbsp;But it’s not that you have to do more things in less time. Instead, it’s about getting more out of the tasks you normally do by reducing distractions.&nbsp;Deep Work is about working smarter, not harder.

Deep Work

<ol><li>Take breaks:&nbsp;instead of trying to get rid of distractions, you should concentrate the energy you put into them during set breaks.</li><li>Schedule tight deadlines:&nbsp;pick your most important tasks, the ones that require deep work, and then you schedule them in a shorter time span than you normally would.</li><li>Meditate: set a scheduled break which you dedicate to physical activity, like walking or driving, focusing your attention on a specific problem as you carry out the former.</li></ol>

Concentrate Your Energy

But instead of denying their use completely, use the&nbsp; “Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection.” This means that you copy the way craftsman pick tools: they use the ones with positive impacts that outweigh the negative impacts&nbsp;if you are a Facebook Ads marketer,&nbsp; use Facebook. If you have found the use of LinkedIn helps you attract traffic and leads to your site, the same idea applies.But if you can’t find a positive outcome from the use of a social media channel,&nbsp;quit it.

Quit Social Media

<ol><li>Schedule all your activities:&nbsp;schedule your day before you start it and organize your work — both deep and shallow.</li><li>Finish your workday early:&nbsp;cutting off your working time early will put your mind in “scarcity mode,” pushing you to finish it in less time than usual.</li></ol>

Eliminate Shallow Time

If you want to find time for your deep work, close all your distractions—email, Slack, phone, internet connection—and work until you’re done. Then reconnect to the world.The strategy is effective for the simple reason that you’re forcing yourself to do your work — you give yourself no choice but to work.

Become Hard to Reach

Emails. Messages. Phone calls. That new season that just dropped on Netflix. How can you be expected to concentrate in a world full of such delicious distractions? It's as if the universe is conspiring against you. In a lot of ways, it is. That means it's your job to outsmart it.

How to Use Deep Work to Ignite Your Productivity and Get More Done in Less Time

People suffering from the fear of missing out have a real need to be in the know of everything. They want to see all the news and events, any office activity they want to be a part of and are always busy commenting on Facebook posts or tweeting on Twitter.
But FOMO can negatively affect productivity in the workplace.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) in the workplace

Teamwork

The following issues can affect some people and should be taken seriously.
<ul>
<li>The fear of not being asked to attend an important meeting.</li>
<li>The fear of not being able to participate in a meeting.</li>
<li>The fear of not being invited to a company retreat or office party.</li>
<li>The fear of not being able to take part in a lunch break group chat.</li>
</ul>

Reasons for FOMO in the workplace

FOMO is not only decreasing productivity, but it can also cause information overload. For example, when something exciting happens early in the day, it can consume so much information that a person can reach his limit. 
His productivity will decrease and affect overall workload progress. Worse is that the information was not even valuable or beneficial to perform his task at the office.

The relationship between FOMO and information overload

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How FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) Keeps Killing Productivity?

<ul><li>Written by <div><a href="https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/author/shahroze-naeem/">Fred Wilson </a> </div> </li><li>Published on <div>June 9, 2020 </div> </li><li>Updated on <div>June 9, 2020 </div> </li><li>Read time <div> 8 minutes </div> </li><li>Category <div><ul><li><a href="https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/category/productivity/">Productivity </a> </li> </ul> </div> </li> </ul>

The 21st century has a barrage of viruses and syndromes. FOMO or Fear of Missing Out is one of them. It comes off as a natural reaction to certain things. While it is true that the feat of missing out in any scenario kind of hinders your ability to function properly, the “ailment” is curable with practice and <a href="https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/one-minute-manager-and-6-apps-to-build-self-leadership/">self-awareness tactics </a>.

Physical illnesses have been a part of human lives since we first came into being, but mental illnesses gathered traction quite recently. They are, in many cases, deadlier than their physical counterparts.

Out of the many mental illnesses that litter the human population nowadays, FOMO is one of the very few that are very impactful in today’s world. Don’t know what we are talking about? Let’s talk in detail about what FOMO is and what impact does it have on our daily productivity.

FOMO or Fear of Missing Out is one of the <a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-cope-with-fomo-4174664">most famous syndromes </a>of today’s world. More than half of all social media users out there, even before the pandemic, were suffering from this and the pandemic only made it worse.

Why? Well, mostly the people that have a <a href="https://sproutsocial.com/insights/building-social-media-presence/">presence on social media </a>always expect to see all the news, events that they have to attend, or any office activity that they wanted to be a part of, but the <a href="https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/coronavirus-work-from-home-in-pandemic/">pandemic </a>shut all of that down in a jiffy and FOMO prevailed.

One thing you have to understand is that, even without the changing rules by which we approach other people daily, the office would become quiet just because the people on social media are busy commenting on Facebook posts or tweeting on Twitter.

This makes FOMO a formidable adversary of productivity in any situation. Let’s take a look at how it affects the workplace.

Whenever we think about the syndrome FOMO, the initial thought in our mind is an image in which different zombie-like figures roaming the workplace corridors with different mobile gadgets in their hands.

That’s basically how <a href="https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/working-with-millennials/">baby boomers review millennials </a>in a wider thought.

But even if you think that this image is a reality, these zombie-like figures are your co-workers now and have since graduated from their teens to our leading workforce individuals. And if you think that FOMO is <a href="https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/5-reasons-millennials-dont-collaborate-over-email/">affecting millennials </a>more, then it’s high time that you think about the fact that this loss in productivity is going to cost your business a pretty penny.

To be honest we can’t even predict the actual reason for someone FOMO because there might be more than one reason to make the person feel like that.

If we talk about the workplace then these reasons might be:

<ul><li>The fear of not being asked to join an important meeting </li><li>The fear of not being able to attend a physical or an <a href="https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/top-meeting-management-software/">online meeting </a>, and chiming in with your thoughts regarding a specific issue </li><li>The fear of not being invited to a company retreat or even a normal office party </li><li>Even the fear of not being able to be a part of a hilarious lunch break group chat in the break room </li> </ul>

These reasons might look quite bleak and petty to some of our audience, but these are real issues for some people and we have to take them seriously. Because, if you don’t, then you are being socially irresponsible and you might lose an excellent employee over something that could’ve been very easily dealt with.

There is another thing that you have to look out for and that is FOMO’s brother in arms, in <a href="https://blog.taskque.com/workplace-productivity-killers/">killing productivity </a>, which is information overload. One of the leading researches has shown that there is a cordial relationship between FOMO and information overload.

Let’s consider a scenario where John is an employee in an organization that is reeking of juice stories every hour.

John, who is suffering from FOMO, is already checking up on every social media platform for new updates about everything that happens around him, and in the lives of the people around him.

This FOMO, or more commonly known as: ‘Fear of Missing Out ’ factor is already decreasing his productivity in the workplace, but there comes a time when he consumes the total amount of information that he could consume in one day.

This limit can come at the end of the workday, but if something juicy happens in the early hours of the workday and he consumes so much information that he couldn’t even perform amicably at the office that day. What happens then?

His productivity takes a hit and it affects the overall workload progress that he <a href="https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/best-practices-for-project-tracking/">needed to keep track of </a>. This is why FOMO and information overload go hand in hand whenever productivity is concerned.

The sad part is that this information was not even valuable or useful to the work that he needed to perform at the office that day, then why did he feel the need to overload his mind with all that?

This is why it is necessary, to keep yourself in check in the office or even in your personal life, whenever you are consuming information from all around you because not all information is valuable or even necessary.

According to a recent study that was conveniently named“<a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/12/07/information-overload/">Information Overload </a>” , was conducted and it showed some amazing stats. It showed that over 46% of the American workforce is overloaded with information at work, 56% of the people found it extremely tedious to keep track of all of the information that they were being by the environment around them.

One other fact that this research unearthed is that more than 47% of the workforce is even having trouble finding information. That is unusual, but it is even more worrisome because if they are having trouble finding any information to consume, how can you expect them to work?

If you look at a normal workday in this digital age, you have a dozen devices around you that are always buzzing and chiming with notifications from all over the world. These dings are not only torturing our attention span in our work life but even when we pack up and go home.

There is no off switch to them if you are addicted to them, but if you want to get rid of them, there are a lot of different ways to turn off these distractions.

Check this out:

<a href="https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/best-focus-apps-to-keep-you-focussed-and-distraction-free/">6 of The Best Applications to Keep You Focussed and Distraction Free </a>

This situation might appear to be quite dire but there are ways that you can turn your FOMO into JOMO (Joy of Missing Out). Let’s look in detail as to how you can safely do that.

Turning your FOMO/ Fear of Missing Out into JOMO/ Joy of Missing Out

If you are living in a world where FOMO is the three-headed dragon that wants to suck all the information from the universe, there will always be an Avenger named JOMO to take it down. Yeah, I know that’s a terrible name for an Avenger, but bear with me on this one.

Joy of Missing Out is a concept which is the countermeasure we need to <a href="https://adaa.org/learn-from-us/from-the-experts/blog-posts/consumer/tips-get-over-your-fomo-or-fear-missing-out">get rid of FOMO </a>from our work lives and one way to do that is “Team Messengers”.

Well, team messengers are designed to get rid of your need to consume information every few seconds when there is actual work to do in the workplace. We don’t promise that every single <a href="https://www.proofhub.com/articles/team-chat-apps">team messenger </a>can do that, but some of them have some amazing features that you can’t ignore.

The main ability of such software is to sum up every piece of information from every source on your mobile device, no matter how big or small it is. If you want to look for a team messenger in today’s world, then you should look closely at its features and how it can successfully convert your FOMO into JOMO.

Let’s look at some of the features that a <a href="https://www.chanty.com/">good Team Messenger </a>should have.

The Ability to Get Rid of Excessive Notifications

Whenever the employees of the company are using the team messenger provided by the company, one feature that they should have, above all else, is the ability to turn off notifications and <a href="https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/ways-to-get-your-mind-focused-on-work/">keep your mind focussed on work </a>.

This enables them to limit the amount of information that they would consume in a day. This creates another hurdle for the company because the amount of information that a CEO consumes in a day will be quite different from someone who just joined the workforce a few days ago as a graphic designer or a web developer.

So, how can a company impose a limit on information consumption, if everyone’s tolerance is different?

That’s why if you think you can tolerate more information than your peers, then you can. But let others improve the quality of information they consume by putting a limitation on the quantity.

Letting Everyone Choose their Own Way of Communication

How FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) Keeps Killing Productivity? - nTask

Work is never finished, and we are unable to disconnect from it, causing us to experience productivity shame, impacting our happiness and creativity.
The modern working profiles (like knowledge work and remote work) do not have strict guidelines on a day’s productivity or any clear deliverables. It relies on a constant flow of communication, collaboration and multiple switching of context.

Productivity Shame

<ul>
<li>Personal productivity is not about all-round efficiency, and it is wrong to think about your input as that of a machine in a factory unit.</li>
<li>This is further complicated by our mistaken assumption that being in demand means that we are doing a splendid job.</li>
<li>We blur our all boundaries between our work and personal life and every minute of the day is to be kept busy as we rush to attend every meeting, cross out every task from the to-do list or to answer every email that we get.</li>
</ul>

The Busyness Paradox: Addicted To Being Busy

Our brain starts to favour small tasks that give a false impression of productivity (woohoo! I just sent out fifty emails!) while we neglect the large, complex but meaningful tasks.
This is known as the completion bias.

Completion Bias

We are not a factory pumping out products. Our constant switching of context, and checking our smartphone notifications/email has a huge impact on our productivity, focus and our ability to get things done. We are rarely productive in the real sense but feel productive doing pseudo-work all the time.
Productivity is not getting more stuff done every day, but getting important stuff done in a consistent manner.

Changing How We Understand Productivity

If we don’t see enough progress by the end of the day, it feels (to us or our superiors) like we haven’t done enough.
Apart from the completion bias, where our brain seems hardwired to wanting to finish the given tasks, we are also having another cognitive bias called the planning fallacy, in which the brain is unable to estimate how long any task would take.
The answer is The Progress Principle, the art of reducing big, audacious goals into small chunks of doable and easily trackable tasks that provide us with a sense of accomplishment.

The Progress Principle

Our self-motivation and excitement have a relatively short life span, and while we want to be motivated before we start something, it is only possible once we have begun. This paradox is called the Motivation Trap and basically implies that action precedes motivation and not the other way round.
The trick is to to create systems and tools that get things done and sets us up for future success.

The Motivation Trap

Getting Things Done is a productivity system that helps us capture our work in one place and manage where our attention is going to be. The five steps of GTD are:
<ol>
<li>Capturing one’s ideas in a tool which is an app of your choice.</li>
<li>Clarifying each task to its next most easy step that reduces any friction.</li>
<li>Organizing each task by priority level and due date.</li>
<li>Review and reflect on your to-do list.</li>
<li>Engage yourself and get in action mode, implementing the list.</li>
</ol>

Getting Things Done (GTD)

There are four elements that need to be done as a ritual to disconnect from work:
<ol>
<li>Create a shutdown ritual each evening.</li>
<li>Physically separate from your laptop and/or smartphone if possible.</li>
<li>Take some time to relax and reflect on the day, just with yourself.</li>
<li>Take up a hobby or something that interests you outside of work.</li>
</ol>

Learning To Disconnect From Work

Take a good look at your life, and the goals you have set, and find out that sweet spot, the threshold of success that you think is ‘enough’ for you to feel productive and successful.
Example: At Google, projects have multiple objectives but instead of an all-or-nothing situation, they have Objective and Key Results (OKRs) which let them set a success threshold (usually 60 to 70 per cent) so that they feel challenged and motivated and at the same time do not feel like a failure.

A Threshold Of Success

End the guilt-ridden cycle of productivity shame, and learn to feel satisfied with how you spend your time – in work and life.

One of the best lessons I ever received in work and life came from unloading mail trucks.

It was Christmas 2010. I’d been hired at the post office for the overnight shift to help handle the increasing load of holiday packages. Every night, truck after truck would arrive and park in the loading bay. As a newbie, I’d attack the interior full force as soon as the door was opened. But no matter how hard we worked, there was always more to do.

It was disheartening and exhausting. Even worse, the veterans all seemed to take their time, slowly unloading and loading trucks throughout the night.

I couldn’t understand it. Until one of them came over to me in the break room:

Take your time. There will always be more work.

He was right. Yet, a few years and several career changes later, this lesson seems to have all but disappeared.

In the modern age of work — especially knowledge and <a dir="ltr" href="https://twist.com/remote-work-guides?utm_source=blog&amp;utm_campaign=stop_feeling_havent_done_enough" rel="noopener noreferrer">remote work </a>— there are rarely strict guidelines on what needs to be done in a day. Instead of clear deliverables, most of us face open-ended days of collaboration, communication, and context-switching.

There’s always another email to answer, an idea to explore, or a meeting to attend. It’s no wonder so many of us feel like we can’t stop working, even on evenings and weekends. How do we know when we’ve done “enough”?

But our inability to disconnect from work isn’t just tiring us out, it’s having a serious impact on our happiness, productivity, and even creativity.

So how can you stop the cycle of productivity shame and learn to do “enough”?

If you own a factory or farm, you most likely define productivity as increasing your output without an associated increase in time or resources. While this might make sense when you’re stamping out widgets on a production line, it’s the wrong way to think about personal productivity in the information age. Unfortunately, many of us don’t understand that.

Instead, we focus on the quantity of work we can complete in a day rather than the quality. We obsess over <a dir="ltr" href="https://blog.rescuetime.com/forget-inbox-zero-understand-email-time/" rel="noopener noreferrer">inbox zero </a>, attending every meeting, and crossing off 50 items from our to-do list every single day.

This focus on getting as much done as possible comes with a number of dangerous consequences. For one, we start to connect our value as a person with our ability to cross things off a list. This causes what psychologists call the “<a dir="ltr" href="https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/dont-let-completion-bias-derail-you-at-work.html" rel="noopener noreferrer">completion bias” </a>— where your brain starts to favor finishing small tasks over working on larger, more complex (and usually more meaningful) ones.

Not only does this mean we’re focusing on busywork over more meaningful tasks, but as I wrote before in a post on “<a dir="ltr" href="https://blog.rescuetime.com/busyness-paradox/" rel="noopener noreferrer">the busyness paradox </a>”:

If being in demand is proof you’re doing a good job, it’s easy to mistake busyness for validation.

Maybe even worse, however, is that we blur all boundaries between work and life. All of a sudden, every minute of our day is up for grabs and should be spent productively.

As Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time , <a dir="ltr" href="https://hbr.org/2019/04/preventing-busyness-from-becoming-burnout" rel="noopener noreferrer">writes </a>:

We run around putting out fires all day, racing to meetings, ploughing through emails, and getting to 5 or 6 pm with the sick realization that we haven’t even started our most important work of the day.

In the end, we’re left feeling like we’re constantly busy but have nothing to show for it. Author <a dir="ltr" href="https://hurryslowly.co/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Jocelyn K. Glei </a>has dubbed this situation “productivity shame”:

Productivity shame is the act of setting utterly unrealistic goals or schedules for yourself and then beating yourself up when you fail to meet them.

Productivity shame stops you from ever feeling like you’ve done “enough”. It’s why you feel guilty for watching TV or even walking the dog when you could be doing something more productive. It’s a terrible feeling that gets in the way of our happiness and well-being.

5 ways to break out of the cycle of productivity shame

When you never feel like you’ve done enough in a day, it quickly turns into stress, overwhelm, and eventually, <a dir="ltr" href="https://blog.rescuetime.com/burnout-syndrome-recovery/" rel="noopener noreferrer">burnout </a>. Being “productive” stops being a skill that helps you spend time on the work or projects that matter most, to an unrelenting war drum pressing you on and on and on.

Luckily, you don’t have to let productivity shame take over your life.

Here are five ways you can recognize the signs of productivity shame, start to set better, more realistic expectations for yourself each day, and actually get more of the important stuff done.

1. Change the way you think about productivity

At the core of productivity shame is simply thinking the wrong way about productivity .

When you treat your workday like a factory pumping out products, it’s easy to think you’re being productive when you’re really just answering a million redundant emails. Yet that’s how most of us spend our days.

When we <a dir="ltr" href="https://blog.rescuetime.com/communication-multitasking-switches/" rel="noopener noreferrer">analyzed data from 50,000+ RescueTime users </a>, we found that knowledge workers check their email or chat app every 6 minutes or less on average . And <a dir="ltr" href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07370024.2019.1578652" rel="noopener noreferrer">a new study published in Human-Computer Interaction </a>found that people switch apps and activities every 20 seconds on average and rarely spend more than 20 minutes uninterrupted on any one activity.

Constant <a dir="ltr" href="https://blog.rescuetime.com/context-switching/" rel="noopener noreferrer">context switching like this has a huge impact on your ability to focus </a>and get things done. So why do we keep doing it? The problem is, we’ve trained ourselves to celebrate this type of work. Being busy — no matter what you’re doing — means you’re valued and needed.

.css-d7z4j9{font-family:'Source Sans Pro',sans-serif;font-size:2rem;line-height:2.5rem;letter-spacing:-0.125%;font-weight:700;}Brilliance Vs Hard Work