(Go back to “Combining Tasks“)
Purposeful Action:
What is Productivity all about, anyway?
To me, it has no reference outside the realm of accomplishing meaningful activity.
What is meaningful activity, you ask?
It could be writing a book, composing music, playing with your children, or advancing in your corporate ranks. It could also be none of those things.
The fact of the matter is, that your productivity is always drawn from your VALUES and BELIEFS about what is important to you, and ultimately about what you see as best for your long term quality of life.
In this part in our series on maximizing productivity, we can go about understanding our purpose and using it to compel us, and we can go about determining which actions are actually of highest priority.
- Understanding and Using Your Purpose:
Many people claim to be “too lazy” to accomplish tasks. This always translates into low productivity, of course, but I pose that the “laziness” is not innate.
Show me a single “lazy” person who has numerous exciting, meaningful goals and a clean idea of their self-defined purpose. I know of none.
We act because of our “reasons,” and with compelling reasons to act, we see action. Otherwise what is the purpose of any growth or any action? Unless we associate joy and fulfillment to the result of our actions, “relaxing” is a more valuable way to spend time.
Understanding what you most value in your life and how to gear your life towards making the most of it on those terms is essential to any fulfilling pursuit of productivity.
If your actions aren’t gearing you towards these things, if they aren’t drawing you out of your current comfort zone and into something more expansive, more creative, more fun, more fulfilling – then you will not act.
What do you value most in your life? What are you doing right now to develop that area of your life, to appreciate it more, to get more involved? Find your meaning here and allow yourself to be drawn by your dreams. That is the only way that visionaries have created on a grand scale – that is the only way to massive change.
Check out my article on determining purpose right here.
- Identifying Priorities:
Finding what tasks and goals are highest in relevance to our life’s purpose is essentially the process of identifying priorities. Here are some concise principals for discerning what actions will take us where we ultimately want to be.
- 80 – 20:
The infamous 80 – 20 rule states that 80% of your results stem from 20% of your activity. Look clearly at your absolutely highest goals, the goals that mean the most to you in your life. You will likely find that most of your day to day activity is not geared towards your highest goals, and that many of your extraneous projects are not in fact productive in light of what you’re most interested in achieving.
Understanding this idea was huge for me. I was growth-oriented, and goal oriented, but my resources were being scattered – not inching me consistently towards my few major life goals. If you want to see massive change, you must determine your highest objectives which you are undeniably committed to reaching. Then you must develop your plan (yet keep it flexible enough to edit), and act in the direction of that objective.
If your major goal is to design new parts for combustion engines, then your most productive time is likely spent experimenting with newly designed parts and talking with other specialists about improving the functions and mechanisms of engines.
Understand for you: what is the highest pay-off task? What activity ultimately makes you successful or not? Whatever this activity is, it sure seems like something worth focusing on.
- Bottleneck:
There is always a portion of your grand life plan that will take more time that the other parts, a segment of your plan that will set the pace for all other growth and development.
For instance, if you are in a marketing division of a company, your biggest bottleneck to developing new sales material and designing new websites and pamphlets might be the confirmation of your superiors. Your team might slow down action, or hold off on its important tasks because they need to ensure that its alright for them to build in that direction i the first place.
This seems blatantly inefficient. Hence, in such a position it would be wise to set up a faster system of support and more open communication with the higher level executives. This might involve limiting their involvement in your department so that you work more independently, or it might a quick daily email informing him or her of your current on-goings and getting the go-ahead.
Do you know what is keeping your strongest horses behind the gate?
Take time to write down what factors limit your productivity, performance, enjoyment or accomplishment at work. Determine which is the largest and allocate resources to solving this problem. You’ll find that determining a plan to deal with the issue is not difficult once you have identified the issue itself.
- Stop the Small Stuff:
This is an active approach to taking priorities seriously. Are you ever aware of yourself when you procrastinate on important life goals?
Given our limited resources we are constantly neglecting certain possible activity when we decide our courses of action. The question is, what options are you eliminating?
In economics there is a term called Opportunity Cost:
The value of the next best alternative given up as the result of making a decision.
We must consistently consider the value of that which we are passing up as a result of taking the action we are taking. As was mentioned previously a prerequisite here is a firm understanding of our values, since we cannot determine which decisions are best for us unless we have a reference to what our values and objectives (specifically what out highest values and highest objectives are).
Am I instructing you to… procrastinate!?
Hmmm, not quite. Here’s why: You can only get so much done in a day, or a week, or a month. So, there will always be tasks that you hold off from. Make sure they are the ones that you WANT to hold off – so that you can engage NOW in those activities that will yield the greatest return on your own terms.
The difference between this function of Prioritizing, and the act of Procrastinating, is that when we Procrastinate we still carry the task as active, and we often carry psychological baggage in terms on stress and a decreased sense of self-efficacy. When we Prioritize we often eliminate a task altogether, or we actually feel good about not getting to it at that time, because we know that we have more productive tasks at hand.
This key difference between procrastination and prioritizing is simultaneously a key difference between failure and success.
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