Why Productivity Isn’t Always the Most Important Thing.
Lifestyle & Productivity
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Lifestyle & Productivity 〰️
Before I begin, I feel like I need to justify myself with the title of this post. I can already hear people screaming at their screens in frustration at the 7 words at the top of this page.
I need to clarify: I love productivity. I’ve been interested in best practices to get things done since I was a kid. My parents would take me to Barnes & Noble when and I’d be more interested in the Self-Improvement sections than the youth sections.
So what I’m NOT saying is that productivity doesn’t matter. But what I will double-down on is that most people understand productivity in a flawed way.
When I read youtube videos and social media posts named things like “10 Ways to be more Productive” or “Do this everyday to get more things Done!,” I wince. Not because that content is wrong, but because the goal of being productive is misplaced.
From my perspective, the why behind the productivity is more important the spreadsheets, checklists, and weekly goals themselves. Ask yourself this question:
“When was the last time I took a step back and really asked the question, ‘would my life look better if I accomplished less tasks each week if those tasks were the most valuable things I could be doing?”
Work has changed dramatically in the last 100 years. If you want to know more about what that change looks like, check this book out. Our time, our energy (both physical and mental), and our responsibilities have grown with the changing times. We simply have more and more “important” tasks that are thrown at us, regardless of our position, tile, or role in an organization. This change makes productivity look like the only solution. “I have more to do, so I have to simply learn how to do more.”
But what if there was a better way to approach our calendars, our task lists, and our lives?
The Value-Oriented Lifestyle
Imagine you have to machines that can calculate the “worth” of any given task that’s on your calendar or to-do list.
The first machine quantifies the “profitability” or the “return of investment” of your tasks. This “Profitability Machine” is a productivity-head’s dream. It can calculate whether or not any task is a good financial investment for you to make by doing this task. It process your to-do list and can identify clearly that some tasks (looking for new clients, implementing new systems, product launch strategies) are simply a better use of your time than others (cleaning your office, doing the dishes, reading the newspaper), and tells you that the best use of your time is to prioritize the high-returning tasks over the less-profitable tasks on your calendar.
The second machine quantifies the “value” or the “return of importance” of your tasks. This “Value Machine,” unlike the profitability machine, causes most productivity-heads to start to feel a little nauseous. This machine looks at your calendar (and your life!) much differently. It prioritizes your tasks based on how much you care about the intended outcome. It places unhurried time spent with family and friends over the next client meeting because at the end of the day, you care about those people more than the potential next business contract. Things that you love (being creative, building relationships, being there for your kids) float to the top of your priority lists while the mundane (but important) tasks of your week are filtered down to the bottom.
If you put your regular weekly lifestyle through these two machines, they hummed and whizzed, and beeped and booped out their rankings of how you should prioritize your time, there’s a good chance these two different lists of tasks will look very differently. The Profitability Machine prioritizes the tasks that will make you successful in whatever you’re trying to accomplish, while the Value Machine will prioritize the often “unquantifiable” tasks that are often most important to you. You’re left confused, discouraged, and anxious because as you look at the two lists, you realize that you simply cannot fit everything you want/need to fit into your calendar.
This is, what I would argue, one of the greatest conundrum’s of our current age:
We’re being pulled in two different directions. One direction is towards efficiency, ROIs, and profit margins, while the other direction is towards your wonderful date nights with your spouse, going to the park with your kids, and pursuing the things that you value most. Times have changed, but we have changed a lot less. And if we can get these two forces to pull us in the same direction, we’re going to live a life that is both productive and valuable.
The biggest question you have to ask yourself is this: How can I leverage my time, energy, and ability to maximize the value of my efforts in my life?
This question can totally transform your life. Here’s three steps to get you moving in the right direction to do this.
1. Identify Your Values
Quickly write out a list of 8-12 things that are the most important things in your life. It could be big and generic like “family” and “friends.” It could be specific and concrete like “starting my business” or “getting that promotion.” The point is to clearly articulate your values and highlight the things that will make the most impact in your life.
Once you have your values listed, order them based on importance. For me, I valued starting my own business and being the best dad to my kids as possible, but ultimately, I prioritized my kids over my business (I’ll explain what that looks later if you keep reading).
Remember, at this point, what you’re looking for is simply a list of your values, not a system to revolutionize your to-do list. A way I think about it that motivates me (even if it is a little morbid), is to think of it as the list that, if spend my life prioritizing these things, on my death bed one day I’ll be able to say that I lived a good life that displays the things that I cared about most.
2. Identify your Goals
Once you have “the list,” the next thing to do is to identify, in a hypothetically perfect world, you’d want to see these things look like in your life.
If you value financial independence, maybe the goal is to pay off those nasty credit cards and student loan debt so you can invest your money into a savings account or donating generously to causes that matter to you.
If you value personal health, maybe the goal is to do some research on gym/fitness memberships and find the right choice for you to get off the couch and lose a couple pounds.
If you value investing in your relationship with kids, maybe the goal is to step back from work some, maybe even turn that next big promotion, in order to ensure that you have the time and energy to fully engage with those people.
This step takes your values and starts to take a hard look at your calendar with the goal of getting the right pieces to fit in the right places. The productivity systems and the task lists come later. Right now, the most important thing here is to get some concrete goals aligned with your values and some big-picture dreams of what your life could look like if you re-organized your life around them.
3. Go After It
Once you have your values and your goals written down (I like to do this with pen and paper because I’m a millennial with the heart and soul of an old man), now is finally the time to really consider what you’re doing each day.
Here’s my recommendation: Look at your calendar for the last few weeks and identify the tasks and times when you’re working against your values. Try to find the meetings that sucked up your most productive times at work, the cancelled date night because you forgot about that extra project that’s due next week, the times when you could have done something valuable but ended up scrolling on instagram for an hour.
Those are the golden opportunities to make some hard choices and begin to invest time into your values. Sometimes you have to be tough on your current lifestyle (i.e. saying no to new opportunities that work against your priorities, deleting apps from your phone that distract you from doing what matters, changing how you spend your time and money) in order for you to build new habits that will get you on track to living a better lifestyle.
This post is the first in a series of content where we’ll be offering practical ways to help you do this, but I want you to imagine what your life could look like if you make this change, to really lean-in to living everyday with the aim of accomplishing the things that matter the most to you.
So many people play defense with their lives, living purely reactionary to the changing circumstances around them. I want you to go on offense with your life: to grab life by the horns and ride it for everything you can get out of it. Chris Sacca once said,
“I wanted to go on offense. I wanted to have the time to focus, to learn the things I wanted to learn, to build what I wanted to build, and to really invest in the relationships that I wanted to grow, rather than just doing a day of coffee after coffee after coffee.”
This takes effort. This takes intentionality. But I believe if you commit to this, your entire life can change for the better. So are you willing to go for it?
