Top Mistakes Really Smart People Make Without Realizing

Why do smart people make stupid mistakes?

No, this isn’t about the time you “accidentally” watched seven straight hours of Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

It’s about the mistakes we make at work. The ones we don’t even realize, but ultimately hurt our productivity and career paths.

In this week’s TL;DR, we’ll discuss:

Author: Greg McKeown

TL;DR: If you’re an overachiever, your career likely follows three steps:

Then something funny happens. You take on so many projects that you feel overworked and underutilized.

To use a camping metaphor — you’re adding poles of the same height to your career tent, hoping it’ll go higher. But it doesn’t. Instead, ask yourself: are you rejecting enough projects? And when you pursue one, does that project raise an existing tent pole?

Changing this means having honest conversations with ourselves as well as our managers. It means having the guts to turn down good opportunities to focus on great ones.

Author: James Clear

TL;DR: Smart people often confuse motion and action. Motion is when you’re preparing; action is when you’re producing. For example,

If motion doesn’t yield results, why do we do it? Sometimes we need to plan or learn more. But more often, motion makes us feel like we’re progressing without risking failure.

That’s the danger: preparation becomes your procrastination. Except unlike watching The Kardashians (but seriously, when are Khloe and Lamar getting back together?), you don’t realize you’re procrastinating. You tell yourself you’re being productive when you’re not.

Author: Jacquelyn Smith

TL;DR: Make no mistake about it — multitasking is a myth. In reality, we switch-task, interrupting ourselves and lowering our productivity. Instead, here’s how to unitask:

This article originally appeared on Every Vowel. Brett Kopin is the co-author.