The more productivity hacks you use, the less self-aware you are
If you're looking for advice out there on how to build a successful business, chances are you're going to come across A LOT of content talking about productivity.
I wanted to give a different perspective on this productivity mania.
We've made productivity a massive cornerstone of building a successful business because of several things :
We're probably building a business that's not right for us/we're compromising on our dreams and building something that will validate us instead of one that we'd truly love to build. Working from a place of compromise is hard because the joy is not fueling us, which is why we need to resort to all kinds of productivity tools and hacks to get anywhere
We're not building something from our zone of genius - the business might be the right one but the way we're going about it might not be
We're held up by several limiting beliefs :
Limiting belief #1 : building our dream life is hard and necessitates hard work and discipline
Limiting belief #2 : building a business is all about the doing. If we don’t ‘do’ anything, nothing gets done. Therefore the question becomes : how can we be as efficient as possible in the doing ?
We're in a society where we’re conditioned to override our emotions. We need to go after productivity hacks because we want to find ways to bypass our emotions/steamroll them and still 'get shit done' even if we're feeling crappy
Let’s look at this differently
How about looking at productivity from a different angle ? How about the first question be : 'how can I be doing more of what I love' instead of 'how can I be more productive'? 'How can I build a life in which I jump out of bed really looking forward to what I have to do everyday?' I'd say those are more inspiring and motivating questions than 'how can I milk every second of every day by monitoring everything I do and assessing whether I deserve a brownie point at the end of the day or not?'.
The truth is that working from a place of joy is probably the best productivity hack ever. Not every day is going to be one love fest full of gumdrops and roses, some days and tasks WILL require a certain level of pushing. But overall working from a place of inspiration is certainly more efficient than working from a place of hustle - and inspiration comes when we're doing things we love.
Doing what you love doesn't require you to have a zillion set ups to get going.
Identify what you love doing. In the internet age it's almost impossible not to build a business around something you love
Identify what's keeping you from doing what you love to do, and work on THAT. Surprisingly enough, looking for productivity hacks can sometimes be a cop-out for doing the real work - that of identifying your fears and working on them - we feel the reason why we're not achieving what we want is because we don't have the perfect system, the perfect 'hack'. The truth might be elsewhere - are you actually in the right place ? Are you focusing on the right thing ? Is your business a reflection of YOU or of what society expects a business like yours to look like?
THEN work on your productivity 'hacks', don't just copy paste from someone else and then feel like crap when it doesn't work out
The truth is that we're all wired differently, and as such we need to find what works FOR US individually instead of jumping on everyone else's productivity bandwagon.
Here's how I've been able to devise my own 'productivity hacks' from looking at just 2 elements of my human design :
I have an open head chakra (i.e white and not colored in) :
This means that inspiration is a process for me. If I have some writing to do, I can't just block out a hour in the calendar and expect to come up with a blog title AND a blog post from a totally blank sheet. So instead of scheduling my writing, I need to allow myself time to just listen to podcasts, read articles, read a book. And then inspiration will just strike and I'll be able to go into a stream of writing where it can take me as little as 10/15 minutes to get an entire first draft out. So my evernote is filled with drafts of potential blog posts that I'll fish from and polish when it's time to post something. This has been a game changer in how I approach writing. Before it used to be a very painful and frustrating process, now I enjoy it a lot more, and paradoxically takes me less time even when I am accounting for the inspiration process.
I have an open root chakra (i.e. white and not coloured in) :
This means that I am terrible with deadlines. Deadlines do not energise or motivate me at all, they stress the hell out of me and if I am working from a place of constantly rushing up to deadlines it will burn my adrenals out in the medium to long run (and also produce crap work). To get the adrenaline kick I need to push through I'll probably resort to too much caffeine and end up more exhausted at the end of it all.
So how do I get anything done if I can't schedule important tasks like writing or I am terrible with deadlines ?
I have a weekly to-do list which I break up into a very small daily to-do - it's just 3 items max every day. Once I get through my to-do I just let whatever time's left in the day to read whatever I feel like reading or to listen/watch whatever I feel called to. Typically I'll just listen to a podcast, say, and that'll inspire a very creative streak where I'll work for another hour or two. When that happens that's great, if it doesn't that's ok too, so long as my to-do for the day is done.
Planning weekly also allows me to start anything with a deadline earlier, break it up in small pieces and get started as early as possible so I am not staring at a blank screen 2 hours before a deadline.
You're probably wondering how it's possible to only have 2-3 items on a to-do list daily? It's totally possible when you're following your design. That's a post for another day, so stay tuned !