Productivity is NOT about getting more things done

In his fantastic book Essentialism, Greg McKeown writes:

“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”

This is a principle that I have tried to incorporate into my productivity systems. (I say try, because it is always a work in progress, and I wish to learn more and make 1% progress on that every single day… forever).

I want to paraphrase his sentence, by replacing the word essentialism, with the word productivity. And this is, so far, the best definition of productivity that I have yet found:

“Productivity is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”

I want to emphasize this point here:
“It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential”

I have goosebumps just writing it again here. This is so important.

Productivity is a personal strategy to operate at your highest point of contribution, by deciding where to put your time and energy. Allocating your (limited) focus to what’s most important at that precise moment.

Productivity is NOT turning yourself into a machine. You are not a machine. You are a human being. It seems that employers (and entrepreneurs) sometimes forget that. You are a person, with feelings, thoughts, ambitions, purpose, challenges, and virtues.

This is why it is not realistic nor reasonable for employers to want their employees to be productive 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, tracking every minute of their time, so that their “productivity” can be inspected and approved (or improved?).

It feels like, in some situations, we are stuck in archaic productivity principles that might come from the very start of the industrial revolution — make more, make faster, make cheaper — while at the same time, expecting creative problem solving, innovation, quality, and of course a culture of joy at work.

We will need to soon shift our mindsets towards a new definition of productivity. Lesser hours is not the answer either, because… well how many? we are all different and operate in different ways.

The answer here?

Hire people that you have great confidence in, and let them do their best work.

Confidence comes from con-fidere = with intense trust.

When we have intense trust in the people that work for us, with us (or intense trust towards ourselves for that matter) then time management is quickly removed from the equation altogether and is replaced by:

Focus allocation.
Energy management.
Recovery Management.
Efficiency management.
Essentialism.
Zen Productivity.
[insert hip new term here]

What do you guys think? Let's start the conversation on twitter!

Yesterday I wrote an article about giving yourself permission to do your BEST work and make your highest contribution! Have a read here

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