Ep 45 – A metric to measure beyond productivity

How many of you have experienced at least one day where you finished everything on your to-do list and have nothing incomplete or carrying forward to the next day?

Awkward Question right! We are going to look at how we need to ditch those productivity standards and focus on something else.

What can you expect from this episode? 

• • 01:06 – What are productive standards?
  • 02:25 – Why do we need to ditch the productive standards?
  • 03:50 – How to improve your productivity?
  • 04:10 – Productivity and presence.
  • 04:50 – Own your everyday tip this week

In today’s hustle culture we all want to be productive. Time is money and we want to be as ambitious in our planning as we can and pack in as many things in a day. But the truth is we seldom complete it. Our to-do lists run for miles – never-ending tedious and ever-growing.

We plan. We fail. We carry forward. We even add to the list, but never have we seen the bottom of this vessel. But it turns out it’s not just us.

Daniel Kahneman coined a term for this – the planning fallacy. He says humans do 2 things

1. We ignore how much time it’s taken in the past
2. We underestimate how much time it will take in the future.

That means all our to-do lists are essentially useless because we have no idea how much time a task takes and we measure ourselves against how many tasks we complete – so we set ourselves up for failure every day with those lists.

Some of you might even start to feel fear and go down a what-if-spiral, what if I lost it, what if that doesn’t happen, what if I don’t make it, and a hundred other questions. You’re either churning something from the past or sitting in anxiety about the future or daydreaming about things that could be.

All of these make your productivity today 0.

And this is because there is no presence.

So here’s a trick to improve your productivity: be more present in your daily efforts and actions. What is presence? It is being aware and alert to the present moment. It is involving yourself whole and soul to the task at hand.

Most of the time we do something with our organs of action – our hands are moving, our lips are talking but we have checked out mentally. Your mind might be going over the argument you had with your boss the previous week, the annoyance at your spouse for not taking the dog out for a walk, or scuba diving in the Maldives like you saw your friend doing on Instagram earlier. When we work like this, we take forever to get things done and even when we do it feels hollow and empty.

Instead of measuring how many items you check off that endless to-do list, ask yourself, have I done everything I said I would do with complete involvement, presence, and my 100% attention?

When you start measuring this, you’ll stop feeling that constant sense of failure because the to-do list here might also be endless but you know you gave it your complete time and attention. And the best part is the more present you are towards your action higher is your productivity and efficiency. You get things done faster and you feel good about it because it leaves you feeling satisfied and fulfilled. Productivity without presence is mindlessness – you’re busy but it feels empty and meaningless.

Remember, as Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,”

Own Your Everyday tip for this week

Observe how present you are as you go about your day-to-day tasks. You don’t have to do anything special, watch where your attention goes and every time you catch it wandering, bring it back to what you’re doing presently. And instead of monitoring how many tasks you completed by what you set out to do, monitor how many of those activities you did with complete involvement and awareness for 7 days? And see how it shifts the quality of your outcome and the fulfilment you experience at the end of the day.