Category: Productivity

The Ugly Truth About Productivity

We use electronic calendars, to-do lists, email, text messages, and other tools to improve our personal productivity. But the ugly truth is that regardless of your level of organization, productivity is a result of your actions.

When we look at productivity, we can divide our time into three areas: thinking about the work, organizing the work, and doing the work. All three are important, but productivity is based on what you actually do. Productivity is maximizing the work.

If you are like most people there are actions that are difficult. There are activities that would be very beneficial, but we shy away from them because they are outside our comfort zone. We fear rejection. We fear failure. We fear what others might think.

As a coach I recognize that we all have a barrier between what we want to achieve and where we currently are. Most people have a difficult time pushing themselves through the barrier without help or support. A coach plays a powerful role in the ability of a person to do more.

Think about some of the big goals you have for your career or your life. What actions are you not doing that are required to achieve these goals? Would a coach help you step out of your comfort zone, and move forward? If you would like to know more about using a coach, just let me know.

The Pace of Success

I have been thinking about the pace of life. If you are like me, when things are moving too fast, you may feel stressed. But if things seem too slow, well you can also feel stress (or boredom, lack of accomplishment, etc). Life seems to have an appropriate pace.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”

Even when we are pushed to go faster in this time of instant gratification, I find that a slower pace when constant usually pays bigger dividends. It is persistence and perseverance that makes a difference.
A slower pace does not mean less work. The settlers that came to the United States over two hundred years ago found success through hard work. Imagine raising and growing your own food, making your own clothes, trading with your neighbors, and cutting wood for heat. The pace of life was much slower, but not easier.

Each of us has a different pace that is right for us. We are forged by our environment, but our environment changes over time. If we are not aware of our own internal pace, we risk losing our sense of grounding that helps us through the stress caused by the pace around us.

What pace is right for you? How do you maximize productivity without increasing stress?

Rules and Responsibility

Rules and procedures are a funny thing. They are used to define decisions, responses, and actions for a defined situation. The intent is to drive consistent, and planned processes. If you could create procedures and processes that cover all possible situations, then your results would be 100% consistent. Also, if correctly designed, your results would achieve 100% of your goal.

But can your procedures cover 100% of the possibilities? I think it depends on the scope of the operation you want to control. Two things I have been pondering about rules and procedures.

First, a person that is instructed to follow procedures without questioning or thinking loses all responsibility for the outcome of the situation. The outcome becomes the responsibility of the person or group that created the rules.

Second, if you want your employees, organization, or team to just follow the procedures, couldn’t they all be replaced by robots and computers? What value does a human provide in a situation?

These questions apply to current events every day. United’s procedures for handling planes with more passengers than seats revealed major flaws in the last few weeks. Employees followed the procedures, but the outcome was not what United would have desired. Could this disaster have been avoided if people were given the ability to override the procedure? Maybe.

We can also look at the rising use of automation, such as Tesla’s self-driving cars. Should a human play any part in driving or control? Or would we prefer to put 100% of the responsibility on the developers of the software and hardware that control the driving?

I think these two examples represent many issues we will face over the next fifty years. It is important that we think about how we want humans to add value, and how much control we are willing to put into procedures, rules, robots, and automation. Are there limits?

Doing Nothing Is Not Really an Option

Have you ever stood still in a river and felt the water rush by you? The water can be a gentle push against you, or it can be forceful. It can cause you to lean, struggling to stand upright.

There are days when I feel time rushing by like the water in a river. In reality, time is always moving like the Earth is always moving. The Earth is traveling through space at 66,000 miles per hour. And at the same time, the Earth rotates on its axis faster than 1000 miles per hour.

Maybe the fact that life moves so fast has made me love the times when I can just sit and think. I love being able to ignore all the outside activity and demands of daily life.

However, even though we can ignore it, the fast pace never goes away. I have discovered it is important to embrace the pace, the changes, and the obstacles that life throws at us.  They are just as important as the quiet times.

Instead of standing in the river, imagine being in a kayak. No longer are we trying to resist the current. Instead we strive to control our kayak. We paddle. We steer.

We decide to guide our kayak. We cannot stand still. Doing nothing is not an option. Life is moving. We can make every day count.