Falling off the wagon

Productivity, there’s a challenge. And yet the world is full of people who claim to be experts in it. If you google it you will find countless pieces of advice, many of them conflicting each other. And that’s because each of us is unique. We each need our own approach, our own systems to make things work optimally for us.

That’s a key learning. After years of tweaking systems, sometimes to good effect, other times becoming a huge time waste – it’s clear that the best changes are the learning exercises that we implement based on a growing self-knowledge. When we take other people’s advice and absorb it wholesale, we are setting ourselves up to fail and to be disappointed.

And falling off the wagon of productivity happens to us all, regularly. It’s how we learn and grow. We need to constantly adjust – productivity is a journey rather than a destination. Every time we think that we have found the perfect way to get things done, something comes along and knocks us sideways. You could call it entropy – everything in a constant state of unravelling. The key is to avoid being disillusioned and see this instead as a permanent striving for improvement. Tweaking this thing, trying a learning experiment there, a new input to this bit. We need to be careful not to obsess over the tech, the tools and techniques we use – they are the means to the end. It is so easy to get lost with a new tool, a great excuse to procrastinate.

At the end of the day, the one thing is to look at what we do to maximise our contribution in the world, to find a way to achieve with balance and focus. Ah, now that’s a great thing to aspire to and to be constantly aiming at – like the pilot of an aircraft constantly changing the route as the air currents move the plane.

Also published on Medium.