It’s an ideal many of us strive for: being productive. Some would make it seem that productivity is the holy grail of personal growth: once you defeat the final boss, Professor Procrastino, you will top the productivity Hall of Fame.
Productivity can be an appealing concept, but I find it surprising that people rarely have real clarity about a simple question.
What exactly does productivity mean to you?
We usally agree on what the moon is (a plump space rock that likes to be around earth but doesn’t want to be too attached). But productivity can be defined in a variety of ways.
Your personal definition determines how you evaluate your own productivity and how you work on improving it, if so desired. So you need some frigging clarity about this, right? Here are some ways of thinking about it, but remember: none of them need to be your truth.
Eighteen faces of productivity
You may view productivity as:
- Spending many hours on something, like working 70-80 hours a week.
- Completing many tasks. You produce a lot of separate results.
- Advancing and completing many projects. You produce mainly completed projects instead of scattered completed actions.
- Optimized use of your time. You are productive when you have streamlined work processes, everything planned out well and don’t waste any time or other resources.
- Optimized task selection. You are productive when you prioritize correctly and do everything in the right order.
- Mental and physical balance. You are productive when you don’t underspend of overspend your energy, get your rest in time and keep an eye on your wellbeing.
- Life purpose contribution. You are productive when your actions are mainly aligned with fulfilling your life purpose.
- Personal growth contribution. When you work on your growth, you feel productive because you are improving yourself with skills and knowledge.
- Good collaboration. You are productive when you work well with others or deliver remarkable teamwork.
- Improving the world. You are productive when you are actively contributing to a better world.
- Working with resilience. As long as you are not let down by setbacks and keep working through obstacles, you feel productive.
- Simplicity. You don’t need to work efficiently because you keep everything as simple and minimalist as possible and that makes you feel productive.
- Dedication to mindfulness. You feel productive when you don’t work like a mindless drone, but you focus on your actions and cultivate your present-moment awareness.
- Roaming freely. You are only weighed down by goals, To Do lists, project plans and milestones. Your productivity thrives when you follow the flow and do whatever feels good right now.
- Work hard and play hard. For example, you work long stretches like 6 months almost non stop long weeks and then take 6 months off to rejuvenate. You need both sides of the coin to feel productive.
- Multi-tasking to the max. When you work on several different tasks at once, you feel like a productive human being.
- Making mucho money. The more money you see coming in, the more productive you feel.
- Full burst activitity: you assign a time window to working and only when you spend that time 100% working, you meet your standard of productivity. Procrastination and extra breaks during that time are the spawn of the devil.
Some pondering material
Of course there are other possibilities here. If any of the above resonate with you or if you come up with an altogether different definition, you could also ask yourself these questions (and maybe even answer them):
- When are you satisfied, what is the benchmark?
- How do you feel when you succeed at this?
- How do you feel when you fail at this?
- Within this definition, what do you need to do more to increase your productivity? For example: spend more time or energy on something.
- Do you get joy from doing more of that?
- Is it impossible for anyone to be productive if they don’t do the thing in your definition?
- Is it possible for you to feel productive if you deviated from your definition?
- Is there any collateral damage related to your productivity? Is it possible that you show some neglect for people around you, yourself, your curiosity or your creativity?
- Is your definition actually yours? Or have you constructed it based on other people’s opinions or expectations?