You hear a lot about productivity these days. Using time as efficiently as possible.
But I think there's a problem with this.
We've grown up in a culture where it's assumed the more time you put into something, the greater the reward.
If you put in 8 hours of studying, you should get a better grade than the student who studied 2 hours.
If you put in 10 hours a day at work, you should be considered for promotion over the guy who put in 4 hours a day.
But it doesn't work like this. Pareto's Principle says otherwise.
This is the principle that states 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.
Look at your own work and your own practices. Look at the work that actually moves your life forward in a meaningful way. It's probably a small percentage of the total time you spend on activities.
(Feel free to leave a comment below and share either way.)
Rather than trying to be efficient, we need to turn our attention to being effective.
Not training ourselves to get as much done as possible. But, training ourselves to focus on doing the right things. The things that will move the needle on where we want to go with our lives.
I could become the most efficient door-to-door salesman in the world.
But I would never beat even an average digital marketer with a targeted, automated email list.
Being mindlessly efficient is like getting in a Ferrari and zooming off on a road to nowhere. That's why I've never been a fan of telling students to practice X minutes a day. Time isn't an indicator of effectiveness.
I'd rather have 5 minutes a day of focused, effective practice that shows results than 30 minutes of crap.
In your work or your practice, make a list of all your activities. Which ones can you say give you results you're excited about? Push you in the right direction?
Focus on those. Figure out how to ditch, outsource, or automate the rest.
Then you'll see what real, meaningful productivity is all about.
This post also reminds me of the whole nonsense of multitasking. Our brains can truly only focus on one thing at a time. If we try to do even two things at a time neither one is going to be our best efforts and not even be efficient use of our time!!
And I think it was Mrs Lamb who taught me to plan out my practice time. I’ve never done that before so I was less effective than I could have been. But Mrs Lamb taught me a valuable skill and I believe my practicing now using her technique makes me more effective and I think I’m progressing better than all those years of just being effective.