Projectitis: 5 Reasons Not to Be Obsessed With Productivity

Reaching too high

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Biting off More Than You Can Chew

This is a most curious topic—and curiously paradoxical at that. Being highly motivated to get things done within a particular time frame can be richly challenging, energizing, creative, rewarding, and fulfilling.

Yet such a powerful drive can also end up enervating, physically and mentally exhausting, disheartening, and (frankly) less fulfilling than frustrating.

Applied not to quantity but quality, it’s like the law of diminishing returns, which states that doing more is better until it’s, well, “too much of more.” Then, its results are no longer productive but counter-productive.

And that’s why it’s key to locate the sweet spot as regards applying yourself to projects that interest you. One thing you can usefully do here is ask yourself (as one of my other posts suggests), “How do I go from doing too much to doing enough?”

So just what does “doing too much” imply? Well, anything done excessively is by definition overdone—as in, many things are good to do, yet beyond a certain point, they’re more harmful than helpful.

When you devote yourself extravagantly—or, better, inordinately—to a project, what began as invigorating can begin to feel tedious, draining your imaginative vigor and leaving you worn-out, distressed, and depleted.

Perhaps the chief irony here is that the pressure you experience to do more comes generally not from without but within.

And it’s typically much harder to be inwardly assertive, setting prudent limits on your ambitiousness, than to assert yourself outward against forces that might press you to extend yourself beyond your limits.

Five Things Which Summarize the Disadvantages of Being Overly Ambitious

Are you experiencing projectitis? Watch out for these consequences.

1. Your ambitiousness can collide with your capability.

When your aspirations overtake certain personal realities, you’re inevitably going to experience disappointment. No matter how much you may accomplish, you’ll still be afflicted with nagging feelings of failure. For, after all, you’ve let yourself down.

That’s why it’s so important to kindly and compassionately offer yourself the message that, given real-life circumstances, you did the best you could. And that next time, you may need to set your sights lower—though by how much will depend on the degree to which you missed the target you originally set for yourself.

2. When you put yourself under pressure, you’ll experience more anxiety.

Unsettling elements of doubt and uncertainty are also part of the picture—and your body will automatically respond negatively, through discomfiting tightness and tension.

Especially if there were external deadlines put on you and you had no voice in the matter, feeling obliged to juggle too many things simultaneously hardly makes for a joyful experience.

So if you have any choice at all, it’s a good idea to let the other person (or people) know that as much as you’d like to, you can’t agree to do what, practically speaking, goes beyond what you see as tenable.

You might then request that, in order for them to obtain the ambitious results they seek, someone be brought in to assist you or that they delay their deadline for completion.

3. When you fractionalize your focus, qualitatively and quantitatively, your effectiveness will be impaired.

By now, many experts have concluded that multitasking, engineered to hopefully save you time and energy, often ends up compromising your performance.

It’s as though whenever you alternate tasks, you’re taking your eye off the ball of the task you started with, such that interspersing your concentration will negatively impact your productivity.

Productivity Essential Reads

The Danger of Confusing Activity With Productivity

12 Simple Ways to Increase Your Productivity

The expression “spreading yourself too thin” is probably as popular as it is because we’ve all had the experience of enthusiastically attending to more things than we could realistically handle—and so couldn’t acceptably execute what we’d set out to do.

4. Allowing your projects to consume you can have detrimental life ramifications.

To remain healthy—whether mentally, physically, or emotionally—activity needs to be counterbalanced with rest. Such a dichotomy, where both sides need to exist in the right proportion to each other, exists as well between the related dyad of work and play.

But when your investment, or business, in doing projects descends into an all-or-nothing “projectitis,” you’ve unwittingly created your own existential crisis. The essentials of your well-being will be out-of-whack in ways that undermine your relationships, particularly with close friends and family.

And, too, the ongoing, unremitting stress is likely to lead to burnout since you’ve given yourself no opportunity to recover from your near-herculean efforts.

Therefore, over time, you’ll battle with ever-increasing fatigue. And that will take a toll on your performance, which, in turn, will culminate not just in exhaustion but also in disgruntled feelings of disenchantment and discouragement.

5. Overdoing it tarnishes your judgment and decision-making abilities.

Making good decisions and solving problems effectively demands a certain cognitive acuity. That’s why you don’t reason as well when you’re tired as when you’re feeling fresh and rested. Your judgment in optimally prioritizing various parts of a problem cannot but suffer when your alertness and vigilance wanes.

This overdoing-it frailty can lead to neglecting important details and making errors in your finished product, which you wouldn’t have been guilty of otherwise. And furthermore, such problems in execution could damage your reputation with others, causing them to question your competence and reliability.

Finding Your Sweet Spot

Everything stated above is to remind you of your limits. And not only to appreciate them but to honor and respect them. But it’s not meant to constrain you or leave out the possibility that with intelligence and forethought, you just might be able to transcend these limits.

You don’t want to push yourself too hard, but neither do you want to hold yourself back when extending or stretching yourself to do more than maybe you’ve done in the past might augment your sense of what you're capable of.

I’m reminded here of Roberts Browning’s famous poem “Andrea del Sarto,” in which the title character opines: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/or what’s a heaven for?” For these lines imply that the attempt to achieve something superlative is praiseworthy, regardless of whether the effort is successful—or “heavenly.”

Still, it’s just as important not to try to accomplish that which you ought now to recognize as beyond what’s viable for you. Ultimately, disregarding your limits isn’t heroic but rather harebrained. And it will only sour your sweet spot, making your labors, however strenuous, both foolhardy and futile.

So, to promote your eventual success, don’t forget to exercise a fair amount of caution.

© 2024 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.