Reason 1: Perfectionism

That’s a pretty common misconception: if you’ve worked for your whole day and accomplished many tasks, it doesn’t mean that you’re doing everything right.

You can go in an absolutely wrong direction, you can pick up every stone on the path, and you can pay attention to what seems important, but it’s not.

Perfectionism might be the first reason why you feel productive but don’t see any progress at all.

Let’s say you’re working on a project. We all want to produce a good product, and there’s nothing bad with that.

But guess what? 90% of all the projects in the world just don’t launch because they want to make them ‘perfect’.

It can be anything, starting with some SaaS and ending with a school project. Yeah, I’m serious.

I’m talking about delaying project launches for minor improvements. When everything seems complete, but you still want to make it perfect.

I once invested in such a project, and the only thing that I heard was, “We will launch soon.”

Uhh, I hate when people say this.

Several years have passed, and guess what? They still haven’t launched.

It’s mostly because they were focused on creating a perfect product and adding as many features as possible.

When crypto boomed, they decided to make everything on the blockchain, and when AI came out, they decided to integrate it somehow as well.

Yeah, they were super productive. They were working the whole day, super productive, and truly doing incredible stuff.

But the thing that I want to convey is that — It doesn’t matter how much you do, matters only the importance of this stuff.

Every day, new things come out, but that doesn’t mean that you immediately need to integrate them into your product. Every day you’ll have some new idea to integrate, but you shouldn’t.

I always say that the only way to create a great product is to launch an MVP, test several strategies, see if people even want it or not, and then start implementing new stuff by gathering constructive feedback.

This concept seems easy, but to my surprise, many new entrepreneurs don’t realize it.

Reason 2: Lack of Clear Goals

Working on multiple projects in multiple areas without clear objectives will kill all of your productivity.

The same principle works here. Productivity matters only if you’re going in the right direction.

Without understanding your endpoint clearly, you won’t be able to get there, won’t you?

Fortunately, you don’t need to spend extra time researching. I’m here to present you with the SMART method that was invented by George T. Doran a long time ago.

1. Specific: Your goal should be clear and specific. Instead of saying, “I want to grow my business,” a specific goal would be, “I want to increase my customer base by 20% in the next six months.”

2. Measurable: You need a way to track your progress. In the above example, measuring progress is straightforward — you’re aiming for a 20% increase in customers.

3. Achievable: Your goal should be realistic and attainable. It’s great to aim high, but shooting for the stars without a spaceship won’t do you much good. Make sure your goal is within the realm of possibility.

4. Relevant: This is about ensuring that your goal matters to you and aligns with other relevant objectives. For example, if your primary focus is on enhancing digital marketing, setting a goal to expand physical stores might not align well.

5. Time-bound: Your goal needs a deadline. Without a timeframe, there’s no sense of urgency. In our example, the six-month period serves this purpose.

I’ve used this concept for the past 2 years and can guarantee that it works perfectly. I finally understood what I wanted from life and what I wanted to achieve, and I started to see the results right away.

I’ve increased the number of sales for my agency, gotten a million views on Medium, and acquired lots of crucial things for my career.

Reason 3: Overcommitment

Saying ‘yes’ to every opportunity that comes your way might be a good decision at the beginning of your journey.

You have nothing, and you tend to do anything just to get better. I’ve even worked for free for half of the year as a UI/UX designer.

That was hilarious, but I got so much experience and so much practice, so it didn’t take that much time to become a senior in this field, open my own agency, and acquire a part-time job in a decent US company.

However, right now, I focus more on declining opportunities. The small prizes can distract you from a much bigger prize.

Overcommitment can also lead to chaos and overwhelm. It’s like when you already work a lot and someone offers you to be a part of their project or something like that.

I was in these situations myself. Whenever I felt super overwhelmed by the work I already had, someone came out from nowhere and offered me some new opportunities.

I just couldn’t say no, I wanted to be everywhere and do everything at the same time.

That’s why I highly encourage you to say ‘no’ more often and think about whether it’s truly what you want.

Reason 4: Inefficient Work Processes

Sticking to traditional methods isn’t a way anymore.

New tools come out each day, and new methods are being discovered.

The best thing that you can do is to implement some of them into your life and work processes to make them more efficient.

Find something that seems interesting to you and keep exploring it further.

If you’re not an accountant, then it would be much better to use Notion instead of Excel. It’s much more modern, and you can basically do all of the same stuff there.

Not using new technologies and keeping up with the old ones will just slow down your progress. If everyone is using ChatGPT and you aren’t, then you will lose in the long run.

Of course, you shouldn’t spend half your week choosing the best tool and trying to automate literally everything.

Building a structure shouldn’t take more time than its further use; otherwise, it would be more profitable not to build the structure at all.

Reason 5: Lack of Delegation

That’s mostly applicable to entrepreneurs and business owners. But it can also be useful if you’re working on a big project on your own.

That’s a pretty bad idea to do everything yourself. Yeah, we all know these solopreneurs and people who built their businesses alone.

However, who said that they’re not using the power of outsourcing? It is just economically more profitable to pay $20 a guy on Fiverr than spend time on some routine stuff, is it?

That’s the fundamentals of every business and essential for productive work. If you see someone who does something better than you do, then your goal should be to acquire him or her in your team to delegate some tasks.

Delegation frees up your mind, improves mental health, helps you to be more focused on the management processes, and does only the most significant tasks without paying attention to the small ones.

Just start by understanding what’s most crucial in your business/project? Then start noticing unimportant tasks to which you still pay attention. The last part would be finding someone who can work on them more efficiently than you do.

I have a good friend of mine whom I met on Fiverr as well. I needed to improve my Medium stories for my personal blog and didn’t want to spend several days on this routine stuff. Luckily, this guy wanted it, and he still helps me with similar tasks.