Did you know that we make more than 200 decisions on food alone every single day? What do you think about how many decisions we make when it comes to addressing our priorities and projects?
Productivity could help to guide your decisions both within and beyond your nine to five. It provides a toolbox to guide your days, decisions, and ultimately your life.
In this post, I want to show you how to find your toolbox. It’s your job to open and use it over the times to come.
Before we find your toolbox, we should take a look at what productivity is. (Note: this post isn’t hard science; it reflects how I as an individual approach productivity.)
What is productivity?
To put it simply, productivity will tell:
- What you’re doing (material dimension)
- When you’re doing that (temporal dimension)
- Where you’re doing that (spatial dimension)
- Why you’re doing that (causal dimension)
- How you’re doing that (toolbox)
The How is the glue that holds it all together. It provides a scaffold to get things done, reach your goals, and earn your full potential.
Let me explain that. You’re in the office with emails inundating your inbox, phones ringing, colleagues asking for assistance, boss pushing for delivery, and more tasks lurking in the shadow. What will you do in that situation?
Most of us make decisions not even realizing that we choose an action over the others. You have to make decisions all the time:
- What you’ll do—taking into account your energy level, the time of the day, the urgency and importance of your tasks, among others
- When you’ll do everything else on your plate
- Where you’ll do your task
- Why you’ll do that, why it’s important, and why you’ll choose that particular action or task over the rest
- How you can do the given task in the most effective way
Hopefully, you realized that all those dimensions are strongly interrelated. For example, what you’re doing determines to some extent the spatial and temporal dimensions (where and when you’re doing that).
Let’s see what productivity could do for you.
Why should you care about productivity?
Productivity can help by providing a framework and a toolbox to get the light at the end of the tunnel.
It will teach you how to filter your important tasks, how to manage your time and energy, how to leverage modern and old-school tools to get things done, how to gain more freedom in work and life, and ultimately how to live a more fulfilling life. But productivity goes way beyond your nine to five: you can harness its power all over your life accounts.
It’s a bold promise, doesn’t it? That’s why I call productivity as a philosophy of life. And exactly that’s why we should approach productivity as a never-ending journey. This blog is all about that journey.
Conclusion
To put it all in a flesh-and-bone package, productivity will address questions like
- How to manage your time, focus, and energy
- How to establish and maintain new habits
- How to set up and achieve your goals
- How to complete your tasks more effectively
- And more…
It follows from the list above that productivity and personal development go hand in hand. If you supercharge your productivity, you’ll grow as a person, and vice versa.
Your one takeaway: Give yourself permission to experiment with productivity and start exploring your toolbox.
References:
Wansink, B., & Sobal, J. (2007). Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook. Environment and Behavior, 39(1), 106–123.
Image credit: Barn Images on Unsplash