Top 10 Signs Your Busyness is Unproductive

{flickr photo by: iamyung}

Your schedule is already book for the rest of the month. You get to just 3 out of 10 goals you have for the week. You find yourself using the weekend to catch up on all of the work that you didn’t finish on the weekdays.

Does that sound like you?

You may be busy, but that busyness may have nothing to do with having a productive business. In fact, you may be filling time with unnecessary tasks that are hurting instead of helping your business.

I was writing a post over at my other blog The Inspiring Bee about keeping yourself busy to avoid following your dreams. I realized the same thing can happen with writing and working on your business.

Read the top 10 signs below to see if you may be unconsciously sabotaging your success.

1. Your home is spotless.
2. You have 5 or more tabs open on your computer screen.
3. Your list of goals per week/month never get done.
4. You don’t even have time to think out and write down your goals.
5. You have an impressive load of clips, but they are all articles you have done for free.
6. You wonder how the day could have gone by so fast and you haven’t tackled one project yet. And you wonder this every day.
7. Your last few windows recently closed were all online shops.
8. You have to use the weekends to write or to market your business because you didn’t have a chance on the weekday.
9. Your Facebook friends and Twitter followers are beginning to wonder if you have a real job because you are constantly tweeting about your latest outing and updating about what you ate for dinner.
10. You’re spending way too long on an article (transcribing, outlining, editing, writing) or a blog post that pays little or not at all.

Why You May Be Sabotaging Your Efforts

There could be a reason why your stalling on actually getting work done. Maybe you’re afraid that you won’t do a good job. Perfectionism is often a disguise for insecurities. Maybe you’re anxious about an upcoming project so you deal with it by busying yourself with online shopping or chatting. Maybe you’re burnt out and need a break, but you don’t feel you deserve it or have the time to devote to it so you find yourself reading blogs or updating your Facebook page instead. Maybe you’re scared of failure and you deal with it by not doing the things you need to do to become successful.

The sooner you recognize what’s keeping you from having a productive business, the sooner you will be productively busy and reaping the benefits of your hard work with success instead of sabotaging it. After all, whether you are a writer, a designer or a business owner, it’s important to work on your business, not your busy-ness.

What has helped you keep on task? Are you guilty of being unproductively busy?