5 Ways You Can Figure Out How You’re Wasting Your Time

As human beings, we’re hardwired to want to reach the finish line. We crave completion. Crossing items off a to-do list and saying we finished and can move onto the next thing.

However, all this obsession with saying we’re “done” can lead to what’s called completion bias–where your brain specifically seeks the hit of dopamine you get from crossing off small tasks, and ignores working on larger, more complex ones.

But not everything is so easily measured. Large (and often more meaningful) projects don’t get crossed off in a day.

To stay committed to the work that matters most, we need to find ways to measure, track, and feel good about the progress we make every single day.

Why We Rarely Recognize Small Wins

When Harvard’s Teresa Amabile looked into the daily habits of hundreds of knowledge workers across industries, she found that out of all the things that can boost our mood and motivation during the workday, “The single most important thing is making progress on meaningful work.”

Just like we love crossing small tasks off our to-do list, being able to see that we’re even one step closer to a big goal is a huge motivator. The problem is that these “small wins” are notoriously hard to measure. And worse, we tend to ignore them.

There’s a reason we’re busier than ever but feel like nothing gets done. When all you see is a huge goal looming in front of you, it’s easy to get depressed and feel defeated. And worse, the modern work environment seems to amplify these feelings for a number of reasons:

Our days are filled with meaningless busy work. So many of us spend our days in reactive mode–answering emails, chatting on Slack. In the moment, it might feel like you’re doing important work. But only reacting makes it hard to measure any true progress.
We’ve lost the ability to set meaningful, effective goals. Few of us set effective goals or have a clear idea of how we’ll reach them.
We don’t set in place methods for tracking progress: Without an easy, repeatable system in place to clearly see and track progress, it doesn’t matter how much work you do, you won’t feel any closer to the finish line.
We’ve lost the ability to handle uncertainty. When you can’t measure progress, large projects can quickly become overwhelming. So we’re more likely to default to the smaller, more short-term tasks we understand.

All these add up to a day that craves structure. And the easiest way to find this is just to stick to what’s in front of you.

But to do meaningful work, we need to fight against the feeling of overwhelm that comes from large projects. And that means knowing how to track your progress.

Here are 5 ways to break the cycle of short-term busy work and start properly tracking your progress:

1. Break Out Large Tasks Into Smaller Pieces And Visualize Them

When Jocelyn K. Glei was launching her first podcast, Hurry Slowly, she realized there were too many moving parts to handle at once. She needed to record and edit interviews. Get sponsors and build a website. Research topics. Find music . . .

So, to track her progress toward the ultimate goal of launching her podcast, she broke out each individual task into the smallest possible piece, and then mapped them out in a visual way:

3. Use Technology To Track Progress On Specific Goals And Projects Actively

One of the hardest parts about tracking progress is actually actively tracking it. Most methods require you to be conscious of what you’re working on, when, and for how long. Yet it’s all too easy for you to forget to keep track and lose the benefits of tracking your progress anyways.

RescueTime works in the background, meaning it automatically tracks the progress you make each day. You can even set daily goals and get an alert when you hit it. For example, I have a RescueTime Goal set for spending three hours every day writing.

Every day, I can see whether or not I’ve hit that goal, or get a hit of motivation when I get my pop-up notification saying I reached it. I can also look back over a longer time frame to see how often I’ve hit that goal and made progress.

Streaks are incredibly powerful psychological tools. The longer we maintain one, the more pressure we feel to keep up with it. By seeing my productivity streak in RescueTime, I’m more motivated to keep going and hit my progress goal for the day.

4. Track Your Metrics On A Calendar

If you prefer to track your progress by hand, you can track it on your calendar.

The idea is simple. Pick a metric (or two) that makes sense for you, and then track how many days you hit it.

Fast Company , Read Full Story