Today’s Read: The Productivity Project (Part 5 - 8)
Chris Bailey spent a year experimenting with and blogging on productivity, and has now released a subsequent work entitled The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy offering advice and methods he still uses (noted in a concluding chapter a year after completing the formal manuscript) to be more productive—not to be confused with busy.
To summarize:
Productivity is defined as “how much you accomplish”, not how much you do, thereby pointing out that being busy is not necessarily being productive. Thereafter, think about what task you value the most and write them down—because that’s where one should invest time, attention, and energy in being productive. This is key because it will determine the way in which the rest of the book is used.
With a slight Buddhist influence, which itself is very inward and self-focused, Chris’s motivation for being productive is to be able to do more for himself and eliminates things that get in the way of that or simply do not make him happy (e.g., he notes the number of hours per week he intentionally spends on various aspects of life in order to be productive, and little priority is given to relationships, but he continues to eat foods and drink alcohol that reduces productivity because he enjoys them and will not give up certain pleasures for the sake of 100% efficiency—perfectly okay, but indicative of his value system).Again, he begins with values for a reason, and we’re all going to differ there from the start.
No one can control or manage time anymore or less than anyone else! I will certainly be paying more attention to my energy cycles and adjusting when (if) I use caffeine for best effect, whether to be energized or prepare for a crash to get better sleep.
Whether one measures productivity in achieving a daily word count or developing relationships some may perceive as counterproductive encouraging a decrease in happiness.
Here is the video where Chris Bailey explains his project for ‘Productivity’ in simple words:
