Productivity Tips #15: Focus On That Which Matters Most
I think I’ve realized why it’s so easy to succumb to the whole getting things done, do stuff for the sake of it attitude. We all want to achieve Big Things in life. We want to feel like it’s all worth it and that at the end of the day we’ve achieved something with our time. But what happens if you don’t have that in your life? Rather than looking for that sense of achievement through quality, we try and achieve it through quantity – replacing a handful of big achievement with lots of small, often irrelevant things.
This doing things for the sake of it mentality is a big disease when it comes to productivity both in your personal life and in the business world in general. It might have worked in the Industrial Age when it came to machines and how much they could produce each hour. It may even have had some credence for people cranking out widgets on the factory floor. But it’s not so good when applied to humans in the Information and Creative age.
When it comes to machines the one thing you can measure about them is their output. They will happily create regardless. But humans can do more, so much more. We can have dreams and goals and aspirations and they can override anything else that we may have to do in our lives. If you’re focusing on achieving that big dream of yours each day, something like the dishes piling up in the sink, or the mail piling up in your letter tray don’t carry the same significance.
Productivity isn’t about doing as much as possible or being always busy. It’s not about filling up all your time or getting things done ad infinitum. It’s about doing the right things in the most efficient way possible so you’re less stressed and have more free time to play with. However without those right things in place – those few goals, dreams and aspirations – it’s all so easy to slip into the busyness mindset.
My current goal is to write a book. As long as I write a couple of pages a day I’m happy with whatever else I get done. What are your goals, and more importantly, are you focusing on them?
Productivity Tips: 10 Clever Ideas For Getting Things Done is an updated and expanded collection of the first ten posts in my popular productivity tips series and is now available to all for free.
4 Comments
Agree. Recently I came to the conclusion that assignment of many smaller goals can lead to failure. As a result I am in the process of defining four major goals, and each day remind myself of how I want to achieve them.
I completely agree, yet I also completely fail to focus on what’s most important. I’m involved in so many things and all of them I feel are important to me. I’ve tried cutting out some stuff to make room for what’s most important, but it hasn’t helped much.
What works for me is to use separate chunks of my time to focus on one thing only. Then, when the time is up, I focus on the next thing in the next chunk. That’s the best I could come up with, so far…
Reading this was very timely for me. I was in a fit of depression about so many things I wanted to get done, but just didn’t. I’ve found when I get like that, it’s good to push through by writing lists of what I can do to change my life.
Career goals are not a part of my planning as I’m now much older, and I can count the likely years left in single digits. Quality and happiness are so much more important now… but daily maintenance is so much harder, and occasionally, overwhelming. So my list becomes my immediate, short terms goals.
I hope that everybody has a dream. A dream of becoming someone, of doing something, of being the owner of a certain thing that you very much desire. Those are your higher goals. But obviously, to get to those goals you have to have smaller ones, right? Do them one at a time, but be sure that everything you do takes you closer to those higher goals.
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