4 Mental Traps That Kill Productivity

(…and how to avoid them to keep a “productivity mindset”)

Productivity has many enemies: too many meetings, external triggers like interruptions from coworkers, and multitasking the wrong way, to name a few.

But more often than not, it’s mental traps that trip us up.

“Mental traps are habitual modes of thinking that disturb our ease, take up enormous amounts of our time, and deplete our energy without accomplishing anything of value,” psychology professor André Kukla wrote in his book, Mental Traps: The Overthinker’s Guide to a Happier Life.

Learning to recognize these mental traps disarms them, enabling us to move past their threat to our productivity.

Here are some common mental traps, accompanied by a solution to set you free.

Mental Trap: The Planning Fallacy

According to the American Psychology Association, the planning fallacy, is “the tendency to underestimate the amount of time needed to complete a future task, due in part to the reliance on overly optimistic performance scenarios.”

Underestimating the time you need for certain tasks means that you’re constantly unable to stick to a timeline. If you’re a freelancer whose clients have strict deadlines or part of a team that depends on you to complete a project as expected, meeting deadlines is crucial to your professional success.

Misjudging how much time you need to tackle tasks also means you’ll try to accomplish more than is possible in one day, which will cause an imbalance in your life. If you take on too much at your job, you might have to reallocate hours reserved for other domains of life — yourself and your relationships — to finishing those tasks.

Those high expectations, plus the low control you have in meeting them, are a guaranteed formula for burnout. After sacrificing hours previously meant for fun, self-care, or sleep, you’re likely to enter a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress.

Solution: Don’t Use a To-Do List Without Timeboxing