“Follow your passion!” We’ve all heard that advice. And while it sounds like nirvana, beware! The tasks you love can destroy your productivity.

To me, your talents and passions are revealed by the things you can’t not do. The activities that perk you up no matter how tired you are. The ones that suck you in and make you late to dinner or keep you up way past your bedtime.

Your passion could be almost anything from making people happy to creating order out of chaos to writing computer code. The more closely your talents and passions are aligned with your job responsibilities, the happier you should be with your job.

But just because you are following your passions, doesn’t mean you are as productive as you should be! Here is why and what you can do about it:

1. Favorite tasks make the clock fly
The hours pass quickly when doing things you love. It is easy to crawl in, wander around, explore, play, polish – and emerge with little to show for your effort. Schedule your favorite tasks before hard stops like meetings or lunch appointments. Or use a timer to pop yourself up to the surface for a periodic dose of reality.

2. Pride and perfection follow passions

Your favorite tasks make you proud. This is where you shine. Unfortunately, your pride and sense of accomplishment encourage costly perfectionism. No one strives for perfection when they hate the activity! Before diving into an activity you love, clarify what, specifically, must be different when you are done. Then establish the minimum time and effort you should invest to achieve that goal. This isn’t about cutting corners and underperforming, it’s about meeting expectations and avoiding the gold-plate that adds cost and will probably never be noticed or appreciated by anyone other than you.

3. Fun tasks defy gravity

Your favorite tasks are probably your happiest tasks. As a result, they tend to float to the top of your priority list, even when they have no business being there. Schedule the unpleasant tasks for the morning and then use those favorite tasks as rewards, even if they aren’t the most important.

4. Rose-colored passions cloud your vision

Your talent and passions are closely aligned with your values. And your values totally color your interpretation of what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and why it needs to be done. Like a lover with rose colored glasses, your passions affect your vision and your judgment. You see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear instead of what you need to see and hear. The stronger your passion, the more this is true. Techies are a perfect example. They love playing in the world of technology and measure their success in terms of technological achievements. They don’t even notice the victims left in their wake by their inattention to the needs of others. The cure is self-awareness. Introspection and self-observation can get you started, but feedback from others is invaluable.

5. The harder you come, the harder you fall

Disappointments involving your passions hit hardest. They are draining and deflating. On top of that, they make you cranky. This is especially true if you believe the cause of your dashed passions is incompetence on the part of someone else. To remain productive, you absolutely must recognize that your values, priorities, and experiences never totally match anyone else’s. Their is always a gap. As you pursue your passions, you must also honor those of your co-workers as well as the company as a whole, even when you can’t fathom what they are thinking. “Mind the gap” to avoid being judgmental and taking your frustration out on others. This will help you remain productive as well.

6. Passion and focus can be enemies

You might think passion increases focus. Not so. The more you care about a task and the more you know about what is possible, the more likely you are to come up with new ideas and see many options and big solutions. As a result, you are likely to run in too many directions at once and sign up for a marathon when a walk around the block would be a more pragmatic first step.  This can be an enormous productivity killer. To avoid running in too many directions, you have to make tough choices about priorities. To avoid leaping into excessive solutions, you first need to recognize your tendency to do so. Once you are able to catch yourself, discipline will be required to keep yourself in check.

Let me close with a great method of using your passion to increase your productivity. Schedule those lovable tasks for the times when your energy is usually the lowest and say good-bye to energy slumps!

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com on February 28th, 2016.