A recent survey of 10,000 employees by AOL/Salary.com reported that workers waste 2+ hours of time a day. You have 1440 minutes each day – how many minutes a day or week do you non- intentionally spend engaging in behaviors that distract you, waste your time, and interfere with your effectiveness?

Though you may surf the internet at work because you don’t have enough time to do personal tasks outside of work, or as well-deserved downtime after a job completed, many people focus on minutiae and time-wasting tasks as a way of procrastinating and distracting themselves.

A lot of the effort that you are expending at work that is not going into producing your desired outcomes (i.e., wasted time) can be traced directly to unconstructive thoughts – in particular to a lack of confidence and ineffective coping. There are a variety of ways that unconfident thoughts and ineffective coping interfere with your productivity and effectiveness. Here is a sampling:

Procrastination as lack of confidence

When you doubt your abilities, you avoid writing your deliverables and “putting yourself out there” for fear of how others might judge you. Common examples include:

• “I don’t trust what I’ve written.”
• “I’m not as good as my colleague, I shouldn’t volunteer for the assignment.”
• “I can’t do the big project I need to do, so I’ll answer emails.”
• “I feel that I need to be an expert before I can even start the project – since I don’t yet feel like an expert I can’t get started on it.”

Accepting overwhelm as lack of confidence

Spending your time worrying about what you have to do and feeling that you don't have control over it rather than taking an action to change it interferes with your effectiveness. Concern that people will think you are "not enough" if you raise the issue may stem from a deeper negative voice. On some level you need to “prove” to others you are enough by the amount of work you take on.

Disengagement as a lack of confidence

When you daydream of a more satisfying job, but tell yourself you’ll never get that job, you get stuck in your daydreams, you go on autopilot at work, and you lack inspiration.

Limiting your sense of possibility in your next career step comes from interpreting “facts” with personalized “stories” that reflect a lack of confidence (see Melnick Newsletter May 2005 for more.)

Pre-occupation with “managing” relations with others

For some people, common thoughts are “I don’t want to confront my peer because I’m worried what they will think of me,” “What does my boss think of me?”, “My colleague is encroaching on my territory and I am angry about it,” “I get so frustrated when my peer doesn’t deliver.”

Here you are wasting time and energy focusing your attention on what others think – seeking to try to know or have control over what others think, rather than “getting your goodies” by producing work you can feel proud of.

Time wasting to manage your negative emotions

If you criticize your own performance in a meeting or feel insecure about your position in the midst of a reorganization, you might be tempted to turn to distractions such as Internet surfing or zoning out in front of the TV as a way to get over your negativity.

The real obstacle to productivity

For any of these ways that you might be “getting in your own way at work,” your behaviors are not just laziness or incompetence on your part. These time wasting activities can likely be traced to the ways that you talk to yourself unconfidently and do not manage workplace stresses head on.

And if you are a manager, you can see that in your organization, efforts to get more productivity from people usually focus on implementing the latest in “external tools” (i.e., new technologies, project management and day planning products, etc.). These tools, however, do not address the real underlying drivers of a person’s productivity.

No matter how much training and direction you give or get, your productivity and that of your team members may be diminished unless the hidden “real” obstacles to success and productivity are identified and mitigated

Techniques for overcoming lack of confidence and ineffective coping are achieved at both a practical, in-the-moment level, as well as a deeper level where the "negative voice" comes from. See below for concrete steps you can start to take today.

A. Be clear about your “horizon point”

Your horizon point is about who YOU want to be, how YOU want to act, etc. Focus on your horizon point and continually give “captain’s orders” to stay focused on how you want to come across to others, not how others will view you (see free download at www.sharonmelnick.com to hear this exercise). Remember that others are not paying as much attention to you as you think they are (because they might be preoccupied with their own distracting thoughts!)

B. Manage others’ impressions in the right ways.

The best way to manage others impressions is to do an unassailable job on the work and to exude confidence about your contributions. Therefore, rather than worry about what others will think:

1. Focus your attention on feeling proud via your self talk.
2. Selectively attend to the aspects of your performance that make you feel proud.
3. Ignite within yourself passion to do a “bang up” job on the work.
4. Concentrate on how you will feel when you have taken the actions that will get you to your desired outcome.

C. Notice the underlying “negative voice.”

Whenever you notice yourself justifying a distracting or time wasting behavior to yourself, try to trace the origin of your performance-interfering behavior to a “negative voice” comment to yourself.

Notice if your voice is a “limiting belief.” A limiting belief is just a belief you have about yourself, one that you think is simply “true” about you, which is why you don’t even notice that it’s “negative!!”

Examples are:

• “I can’t do this”
• “Others will think I’m not good enough”

How Your Organization Can Benefit (and you, too!)

Sharon Melnick, Ph.D. now does trainings for organizations to give people skills to “get out of their own way” at work. Participants report increasing their confidence, reducing their stress, improving their productivity, and creating a trusting culture at their work places. She can bring these results to your organization starting on the very day of the training.

If you bring Dr. Melnick to your organization you are eligible to earn 10% of the training fees.

If you know of someone or organization who could benefit from this work, please forward this newsletter or encourage them to contact Dr. Melnick.

Action Tips

A. Be clear about your “horizon point.”

B. Manage others’ impressions in the right ways.

C. Notice the underlying “negative voice.”

To read more about these tips, see our article, Action Tips for Improving Confidence-related Productivity, left and below.