The tasks pile up, but you can't manage to complete them. But where are the obstacles? The biggest productivity killers and what you can do about them.
Too many tasks, inefficient structures or the distraction of smartphones. Many things reduce productivity at work and thus work performance. You don't get anywhere, you're constantly frustrated and the next items on the agenda are already waiting. But most barriers to productivity are unnecessary and can be avoided. The biggest productivity killers at a glance.
The four biggest productivity killers at a glance:
Inefficient meetings:
Hour-long conferences with too many participants and discussions that lead nowhere. Meetings can be time wasters and limit productivity. A
2023
study by the chat provider
Slack
showed that respondents rated only slightly more than half of their meetings as a good use of working time. Around 36 percent of the meetings were even classified as unnecessary. Steve Jobs, co-founder of the technology giant Apple, also didn't think much of the meeting culture at the time. As
GQ-magazin.de
explains, he made this clear in an interview with
Business Week
in 1997: “Meetings are one of the worst things in today's company. They are terrible. Meetings interrupt work, break momentum, kill creativity. And it’s hours and hours of wasted time.”
Distraction:
Most people probably know it. You want to concentrate entirely on one thing, but you just can't. You chat briefly with your colleagues, read a few emails and suddenly an hour has passed and you haven't accomplished anything. Multitasking is not for everyone. A
2013
Cardiff University
study found that people overestimate their ability to do multiple things at once.
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Too many emails:
You come to work in the morning and open your email account. The inbox is overflowing and dozens of messages are still unread. Before you start your day's work, you first have to process your emails. Many of them are often not important at all and just end up in your inbox because you are on an unnecessary mailing list.
Bad mood:
A 2023
study by the
German Economic Institute
showed that well-being increases work performance. Satisfied employees are more pragmatic, are absent less often and get along better with colleagues and customers. A bad mood at work, on the other hand, causes a lack of motivation and sluggishness. The reasons for this can be different. Whether you are annoyed by work colleagues, have a bad boss or are generally just dissatisfied with your job. A bad mood is not good for productivity.
Barriers to Productivity: What to do about them
Meetings should have a clearly defined goal so that you don't stray from the topic. The number of participants should also be kept as low as possible. This way you can avoid employees finding themselves in the meeting and not being able to contribute anything at all. As
Einkauf-und-management.de
explains, you should keep the duration of the meetings as short as possible when planning them. Instead, it's better to build in a buffer after the meeting that you can still use if necessary.
Sort your emails into categories and folders. This is how you keep order in the sea of news. Newsletters that you do not read should be unsubscribed. If you are still undecided whether you want to delete an email, the archive function can help.
Make a to-do list and work through your items one after the other instead of parallel to each other. Work with concentration and take short breaks at the coffee machine to talk to colleagues.
Are you dissatisfied in your job? And does that limit your productivity? Then you should do something about it. You can talk to your boss about it and work with him to find a solution to your lack of motivation at work.