You are doing your best to get your work done, but something keeps holding you back. It’s like a flu that inhibits your every effort to perform. Leaving you overwhelmed, stressed and generally sad.
Chances are, you yourself have experienced these emotions or seen your coworkers or friends go through it. In fact, everybody who has worked or gone to school knows these feelings and it’s totally normal. It might even not be entirely your fault. The real question is: is there something we can do about it?
I like to call these behavioral patterns “Fake work” conditions. Primarily, because these conditions are getting in the way of doing what really matters. Ask yourself, if spending the whole day in meetings helps you to get the important tasks done or does doing multiple tasks at once get you closer to your goals. Or is it just creating the illusion that you are doing something?
It is so easy and also human to suffer from these conditions. Nowadays, we are constantly bombarded by notifications wherever we are and multitasking is a side effect, which is slowly destroying us. According to a Stanford study, multitasking damages your brain and your career. Another research confirms that phone notifications can hurt people’s performance on an attention-demanding task.
Being busy, stressed, bombarded by notifications is nothing new and it has been constantly talked and written about. What interests me is why with all the tips, hacks and lists aren’t people getting better and why the productivity is still falling? I understand there is no simple answer, but there are better ways to acknowledge the problem and there are solutions each and every one of us can implement.
I work for a collaboration software company that helps teams to be more productive and focused on work that really matters. Therefore, I have had the chance to study and see first-hand from the customer feedback that most of the “Fake work” conditions can be improved or beaten.
I am not a doctor, but imagine if all the following “Fake work” conditions would be actual diseases then there obviously would be symptoms and a course of treatment, right? Relying on the best management and productivity techniques out there, our staff has compiled the “Say NO To Fake Work” infographic for the people who are tired of doing fake work and want to start their treatment right away.