These days most of us are under pressure to increase our output, not to win promotion, but simply so that we can hang on to our tatty office chairs, crumb-filled keyboards and the other paraphernalia of office achievement. But when you’re trying to save time and boost productivity, it’s best to avoid these pitfalls.

Go over the top. Some organisations seem to feel that, although it’s impossible to cram more than 24 hours into a day, it’s certainly feasible to expect staff to work more than the usual eight or nine of them. Andrew Hill, the director of talent management at Chiumento, an HR consultancy, has worked with several companies that expected managers to work a 12-hour day, jump on an eight-hour flight, then head straight into another long day of meetings with only plane sleep to sustain them. “Then we showed them that someone working on three hours’ sleep performs at the same level as someone who has has drunk seven pints of lager,” he says. If that’s you, chances are that you’re making mistakes, working inefficiently and highly likely to burn out some time soon.

Multitask. Mobile phones, BlackBerries and other such gizmos are designed to give us the ability to do more with our time, but they’re just as likely to distract us from critical tasks with meaningless warbling, says Martin Addison, the managing director of Video Arts, a learning resources producer. He’s limited his use of such devices after finding that answering their pings in meetings meant that he missed key figures and other crucial data. “I’d look up and find that the conversation had moved on while I was trying to multitask,” he says. “To be most effective you have to be fully present.”

Cut things too close. Dave Moss, a director of PSAfilms, was working in advertising when he came across a company that decided to promote its wares at a press event by hiring a man to juggle tables with his feet. The performer was based in Los Angeles; tickets were booked to fly him to London to do his thing with the furniture and jet back home again with minimal time spent waiting around. But no one factored in the time difference. “He turned up here at about 4pm – after the show was over,” Moss says.

Rely on Big Brother techniques. Sales managers at a major chemical company introduced a weekly call-planning sheet to make sure that staff were pulling their weight, says Anderson Hirst, a former sales rep who is now a senior consultant at Krauthammer, a coaching and development consultancy. Everyone filled in the details of their planned work, thus reassuring bosses that work was happening. “It seemed an effective management control tool until complaints were received from the customers of one rep, saying that he hadn’t been seen for months,” Hirst says. “It turned out he had been falsely completing the form for nine months, during which time he had set up his own business.”

Focus on targets. Setting goals and expecting people to hit them – and perhaps even encouraging competition between colleagues – may seem an obvious way to improve productivity, but it can backfire, Hill says. “Most people want to avoid conflict. They want reward for input, not for hitting targets.” And the reward they’re most likely to want is not a huge bonus but a simple thank you, which is simple enough but frequently forgotten, he says. On the other hand, rewarding people for effort rather than achievement does seem a bit primary school.

Make things too complicated. When Graham Cooke, a project manager at Google, was given a job that involved a lot of work and a very tight deadline, he decided to split his team into sub-teams to work on specific parts of the task. That way each part of the group would do its bit then combine forces to pull the whole thing together. It should have been efficient; unfortunately, as revisions kept coming it turned out to be harder than expected to keep track of what went where. “We were on about version 25, getting towards the end of the day,” Cooke says. “We reviewed it with one group and then with our manager.” He wanted changes, which duly went ahead, but by that point another group had – quite legitimately – gone for the day, leaving Cooke lost as to which version of which bit was supposed to go into the final product. “We didn’t know what we were missing. We had to end up writing their bit and it took so much longer.” Since then Cooke and his team have been using the company’s own Google documents facility, which lets a number of people collaborate on any one document while tracking and saving all changes.

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