Before you get all proud about getting a bunch of things done, take a minute to ask yourself a few questions.
There is much ado about to-dos.
If you’re like me, you have a list of “next actions,” which you’ll undoubtedly use as your yardstick to measure how angry you should be at yourself at the day’s end. That list has all sorts of actions on it, from sending follow-up emails, to spending time updating a quarterly report, to thinking about how to handle a tough demand from a key customer.
Nice List…
Years from now, archeologists will look through our fossilized “to-do” lists and marvel at just how productive we all were. How could they not? I mean, you sent thirty-five follow-up emails that one day in June. Look how many meeting minutes you pushed out the team! You “worked on Q3’s report presentation” every day that one week in October! Holy smokes!
You caught the snark, right?
Yes, it is important to cross items off of your list — I won’t deny that. But crossing a bunch of items off of a list (or several lists) is not what productivity is all about. In fact, too much focus on that actually undermines productivity. Why? Because productivity is not about getting a bunch of things done; it’s about figuring out the best things to do, and taking the most efficient route to get them done.
That’s it — that’s all there is to being truly productive.
That means that you can get 50 things done today, tomorrow, and the next day (for a grand total of 150 things in 3 days, you beast, you!!) without being productive. Crazy, no? If the 150 things you crossed off your list are not attached to worthwhile goals of yours, you were unproductive.
An Admonition
We hear a lot these days about the dangers of getting sucked in to checking our phone too often, or about notification overload. We hear about the way that our brains react to things like re-tweets of our stuff, recommends on Medium, or Facebook likes. It can be dangerous.
But what I don’t hear about (and maybe I’m looking in the wrong places) is a similar danger with what obsessively checking stuff off of a list can do to us. After all, that feeling of crossing something off as “done” can be addicting — so addicting that we lose focus on why we have stuff on our lists in the first place.
Is it on your list because it will add value to your life or someone who deserves it? If the answer is no, perhaps it doesn’t belong on your list.
If you find yourself doing a bunch of things without intuitively understanding how they fit in with the goals of your life, that’s a problem. Furthermore, if you don’t have an intimate familiarity with what your overall goals are — but know all of the tasks you need to do today — that’s an even bigger problem.
I’ve written about this before — there is virtue in being able to understand how all of the tasks and projects on your plate fit into the box of your overall life goals. If you can’t see that fit, then you may just be busy for busy’s sake — and that is the antithesis of adding value.
TL;DR
If you have a to-do list, each action on there should be one that you can very quickly connect to an overall life goal of yours. If you have more than a few items that don’t match that description, getting them done is not being productive.