Ugh… so I’m sitting here again, spending Sunday afternoon trying to sort out my productivity – so I believe – by looking through yet another to-do list, trying to get a grasp on the newest “magic” work management app, and overall wondering why can’t I just get my work done.

For many of us, productivity seems to be a perpetual struggle. We’re constantly trying to find new tools or methods that will help us manage our tasks more efficiently. But why does productivity only seem to be a problem for people whose jobs are done predominantly on a computer? Is there something wrong with us? Do we really need five different tools just to handle our to-do lists?

If you find yourself constantly spending more and more time on managing your productivity setup and neglecting the things that really need to be done throughout your day – your actual job – then you are in a productivity hole.

The best starting point is to go through your average day and pay attention to how you’re spending it. A healthy habit is to start the day off with some form of review – check the tasks you handled the previous day and compile the final list of things you need to do today. But this shouldn’t take you more than 10-15 minutes. After that, you should no longer focus your efforts on micro management and questioning your work.

Questioning our work is a very common problem. We review our plan, pick our tasks, and start working. However, after an hour or two, we get back to the plan and start questioning whether certain tasks should really be on our list. So we do some tuning up and go back to work. After a couple of hours, the story repeats itself. This habit really kills our productivity. It’s much more effective to just set the tasks of each day once, and then execute them through the rest of the day, questioning nothing.

We’re often tempted to constantly work on improving our productivity by introducing more and more productivity tools or apps. While it’s a lot easier to deal with this problem if we remember “perfect is the enemy of good.” If some solution is working just fine for us and it makes us productive, we shouldn’t go out of our way to find a replacement.

Apart from constantly questioning ourselves, going back and forth between working and planning, and experimenting with too many productivity tools, another popular problem is doing things that we simply don’t need to be doing. Either because they can be skipped altogether, or because someone or something else can handle them much more efficiently than us.

So how can we fix these productivity holes?

First, we need to identify the tasks that consume the most of our time. Pick the core – the most important – activity as part of those tasks. For example, if we’re pitching clients, the core activity is finding the right clients and offering them the right solution. Then, we should list all the side activities that are required to handle those tasks (yet are not the core ones). For pitching clients, it’s sending the pitches, proposals, tracking responses, and so on.

Finally, try finding a tool that will optimize those non-core activities for us. By doing this for just the top three of our most time-consuming tasks, we will see huge improvements in our productivity. And if we combine this with being a CEO in the morning and a worker throughout the rest of the day, we will multiply our productivity even more.

In conclusion, productivity should not be a perpetual struggle. We need to recognize when we’re in a productivity hole and take action to fix it. By simplifying our productivity tool usage and not doing work we don’t need to, we can become more productive without going crazy.