6 Productivity Principles That Might Surprise You
Increasing productivity doesn’t have to mean we become like machines. Constant busy-ness is not only damaging to your mental health but is also unsustainable. Making a few changes to your approach can make you more productive.
1. Stop using email! Srsly
I’ve already ragged on email quite a bit so I’ll save you the time and just recommend that wherever possible move your communication to better channels like Slack, and your tasks to a better management system like Asana. These are modern systems designed over the years of observing how people in today’s world communicate and manage projects.
There are lots of ways to transition without losing the fact that everyone still uses email. You can search on Google or you can hire an expert like me or any of the many productivity experts out there to take that work off your shoulders. It’s now up to you to take my mini lessons and turn them into action. I hope you’ve been enjoying them! I’ve tried to chunk them out small enough that you can take action in them individually. It’s a big deal to make these kinds of changes in your life. Be bold. You’ve got this!
2. Repeat after me: I will not use productivity to make myself busier
There’s a big difference between getting more done and becoming busier. The point of productivity for machines is to become as busy as possible for as long as possible in as effective as possible a way. The point of productivity for humans is to spend as much time in our zone of genius as possible. I mixed up humans and machines for many years. In fact I was so busy 7 days / week and unable to stop working that it took me 6 weeks of therapy to just take Saturdays off. Now I‘ve structured my time for a very happy balance of time in and out of the work I do.
In fact I no longer separate work and life, but that’s a topic for another post (or a book in fact wink wink). Gay Hendricks describes our zone of genius as the zone of activities that give us tremendous energy, feels easy to engage in and allows us to create our unique contribution to humanity. What he’s pointing to is that the point of productivity is to take as much of the other stuff off our plate as possible, and to spend more time doing activities that bring us energy, joy, contentment, purpose, and connection to others and the world.
Zen Buddhist priest Rev. angel Kyodo williams uses the term “lifeativity” in place of productivity as a reminder that the point is the life part, not the productive part. Both of these spiritual teachers are on to something big...humanity vs. the factory. I urge you to take a few days before you set up any productivity system to seriously contemplate your motivation.
Do you want to be more productive from a scarcity mindset that only knows the factory model as a solution to it’s problem of “not productive enough?” Or do you want to be more productive because you notice you’re spending too much time doing activities that drain you and you want to turn that around? Be honest with yourself! I was 100% stuck in the first one for a long time. It wasn’t until I got honest that I was able to transition over to a joyful play-based work productivity system.
3. Know the difference between intuition and fear, and your creative floodgates will open
Working hard out of fear is purely draining, because fear is intensely draining. You will be measurably less productive if you’re working out of fear or scarcity. Working hard out of intuition is purely energizing, in fact it only looks like you’re working har when in fact it was so easy for you that you barely noticed anything was happening. I think we all know this to be true, yet we forget it as soon as we get scared. It’s so darn familiar to fall back into the world of endless worries and predictive anxiety.
If you’re reading this then for at least this one minute in time you’re safe and free, and there’s absolutely nothing you *have* to do or *should* do. I invite you to take a deep breath and contemplate that! That’s just the beginning. Take this one minute now and expand it. Find every one minute from now on that you’re free and let yourself experience that freedom. In the space free from constant pain, anxiety, and worry comes intuition. At first we need to put a wedge in that door to reduce the volume of the fear.
Once we become more spacious, our intuition starts to shine through. You may wonder, what’s the difference between intuition and fear? How can you tell them apart? Suzy Batiz says “Intuition is a quiet and innate knowing; fear is an adrenaline spike of panic.” I couldn’t say it better. In the space free from fear, your intuition will turn into immense creativity and immense productivity. It’s increasingly happening to me and if you’re not feeling immensely creative right now I know it’s there just waiting there for you to discover the well.
4. Build yourself a food-garden
Here’s how you’ll know when you’ve built the right productivity system for yourself. It will feel like having built yourself a food-garden in your yard. In the northwest we can grow great squash, tomatoes, apples, strawberries, kale, and so many other delicious plants. You do some work to set up the garden, and then you reap many times the amount of effort in return (especially from those tomato plants which can totally blow up). Yes you need to upkeep your productivity system, because that system is alive like a garden - the plants are your ideas, tasks, and projects. But when you get the system right, you’ll start harvesting all those seeds that you planted.
In fact you’re going to have so much free time that it’s going to open up your creative channel and you’re going to be capable of doing way more. At that point you have some new much more fulfilling problems to solve, like how to make your singular contribution to humanity, and how to do so in a joyful community-oriented way. Ok but now that we’ve been talking about food I really want to know what is your favorite garden food? Mine is either those sweet little cherry tomatoes or strawberries. Yummmmm.
5. Understand the energy pool principle
I’m in the process of writing a book about this right now but I’ll give you a little teaser. The question my book attempts to answer is, “Is it possible to have endless energy?” I’ve been spending more and more time in my unique zone of genius and realizing that the more time I spend there, the more energy I have. It’s raised a new question to me, what if everything I did energized me, both output and input? Would it take shifting things externally, internally, or both?
I’ve discovered that we each have unique energy pools that when are full, make us feel energized, and when are empty make us feel drained. If we learn to balance the pools and switch between them we can basically cycle endless energy within ourselves. Makes sense right?
We have many obstacles stopping the flow though, and the first task is to pay attention to figure out what the energy pools are. I recommend starting by categorizing your activities into physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Even though most activities are a mixture of the above, if you can start by learning to balance those four pools of energy, you’ll see a massive increase in your standing level of energy which feels like aliveness/vitality. Don’t leave me hanging! Report back with which activities you discover that fill each of those pools.
6. Commitment is the key to productivity
When I work with clients to set up a productivity system, the biggest issue is that they don’t fully commit to it and so after about a month it falls apart. Sometimes they think it was because the system is too complicated or that they’re not tech savvy enough. But almost always it was because they didn’t commit fully to it or they didn’t have faith in it to begin with. You don’t need to trust your system from the get go, in fact that’s impossible because trust is just the byproduct of repetitive positive experience. But you do need to have enough faith in it to commit yourself wholeheartedly to it. Because any productivity system is mostly composed of your brain, if you are half in half out, your system will be half and half out, and it won’t be able to reliably catch you when you fall.
So I recommend the following two things:
Make sure your system feels good to you emotionally, not just logically. It has to be somewhat enjoyable to organize your thoughts, tasks, and projects otherwise you’ll never do it.
Once you’ve established a system you feel good about, make a ritual about committing wholeheartedly to it by doing a full Konmari style cleanse of all your tasks, projects, and thoughts. If you need help you can always DM me.
Doing a full cleanse and committing is the difference between a system that will last you forever and a system that wi last you a month, it’s worth your investment.
