3 Productivity Killing Habits You Need to Kick

Ever seen a car salesmen go from prospect pitching to baseball pitching in 5 seconds? Probably not. Have you seen a surgeon go from operating on a patient to operating a slot machine in 5 seconds? Definitely not. Yet web designers can go from designer to professional time waster in just 5 seconds. This is due to the fact that our work and our recreation exist only a click away from each other. While working for our clients or employers, we face a constant temptation to waste a few minutes here and a few minutes there. You must avoid these productivity killers in order to remain an efficient worker.

1) Stat checking

Do you randomly check your stats in the middle of billable hours? Stats that commonly fuel time wasting include:

• Google Analytics/StatCounter
• Search Engine Rankings
• Adwords PPC Snapshot

Checking these stats while billing hours for your client or employers equates to stealing. They’re paying for your hours of labor, not your hours of statistic obsession. Additionally, of these statistics, the only one worth checking daily is your PPC campaign.

Your site traffic statistics have much more meaning in larger quantities. Daily or hourly measurements of your traffic do not provide a large enough sample size for adequate trend analysis. By checking these stats religiously throughout your work day, you not only waste your clients time, you waste your own time as well. Besides, it’s much more satisfying to see that 200 people have visited your site since you last checked as opposed to 5 people.

As for search engines, rankings can fluctuate daily. Checking your sites’ search engine rankings every hour does not lead to good data. SEO is a long-term process and should be measured as such. Use tools such as SEOMoz’s Rank Tracker, which automatically emails you rankings of tracked sites every week.

Each time you check these stats you lose five minutes of effective productivity. How so? You lose at least 3 minutes actually checking the statistics, and it takes at least another 2 minutes to fully reacquire the level of focus you had before diverting your attention. Designers who compulsively check their stats can easily lose an hour of work in a workday.

2) Social Networking

Facebook and Twitter can easily consume your entire work day. Web designers are more susceptible to getting sucked in for 30 minutes at a time thanks to the link-bait posted by people we follow on Twitter or befriend on Facebook. Link-bait begets link-bait, and without even knowing it, half an hour can slip by as we move from article to article. A recent report suggests UK employees have stolen up to $22 billion dollars worth of labor by using social media on the clock.

Some argue that social media gives your mind a needed break which increases productivity in the long run. While I find the argument valid to an extent, you have to examine your personality to know if this principle applies to you. If you know you’ll be taken on a wild social media ride once you read a tweet, don’t deceive yourself into thinking you’ll only engage in social media activities for a few minutes. It will kill your focus.

3) Skipping out on sleep

When deadlines loom around the corner, sometimes you can’t avoid skipping out on sleep. However, be aware that depriving yourself of sleep severely hinders your ability to function. If you must resort to skipping out on sleep, do not make a habit out of it. Every portion of the web design industry involves creativity and problem solving: creative design, creative code, creative marketing solutions. Since creativity and sleep are directly related, as demonstrated by a Harvard Medical study, not getting the recommended amount of sleep each night could prevent you from coming up with the creative solutions required of you.

Also, keep in mind that in addition to coming up with creative solutions for clients, you must also deal with the business portion of web design: filing, invoice creating, customer calling, etc. These tedious but important jobs become almost impossible to undertake while sleep deprived.

In order to consistently create solutions that you and your clients can take pride in, these productivity killing habits must be eliminated from your work day.