How to Be More Productive

It's a sign of my growth that I no longer feel measurably uncomfortable about writing an article with a title like How to Be More Productive. When one of my publishing team suggested giving my books titles structured like that, I remember bristling and - again - feeling uncomfortable. Who am I to answer a question like How to Start When You're Stuck or How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up?

I don't know the answers to those questions... or at least I don't know the answers I have are right, for sure!

The realisation I had was twofold: that no one knows the answers to those questions for sure, but it's still important to help people with them. And also, I did know something about those things. I had wrestled with them and helped people wrestle with them.

I have also learned two ways to answer the question 'Who am I to do this?': literally answer it, outline in black and white why I am suited to do it. And also understand: I'm not the person who can definitely do it... not until I've done it. I can't be.

A sign of all this growth was present when I was planning, along with the alumni team at UCL, a recent talk for them. It was me, this time, who suggested the straightforward title: How to Be More Productive.

Again, I had some Resistance to that. But I reminded myself, ahead of the talk, in black and white: I'm someone who has written 270-odd blog posts, written four books, has two podcasts, runs a successful coaching business and all of that while not feeling stressed and overrun by work (or, not feeling that way all the time), and while only working four days a week so I can spend a day with my daughter. Even I have to admit that sounds quite productive.

And the talk itself was powerful. It was powerful for me: to really become someone who had given a talk with that title (most of the content had been developed for leadership programmes I lead for some of the UK's leading academic researchers on behalf of 64 Million Artists, but never used with as bold a title). And it was powerful because being in a room with a group of people teaches us things: I always learn new lessons when I speak to people, especially in a physical space. Here are some of the things that stood out from the talk:

1) People don't feel productive. I started the workshop asking questions: who wants to be more productive? (all the hands go up - you'd hope so, given the title of the workshop). But when I asked something like 'Who feels productive already?' almost no hands went up. I was caught off guard by that: a sense that people - even people like teachers, paramedics, developers and more, who are undoubtedly working hard, don't feel productive. I didn't expect everyone, but the handful of hands in the room were a shock.

2) Productivity is not the same as busyness. 'Who feels busy?' I asked this question later, suspecting the answer, but seeing it in a show of hands showed it so clearly. Almost all the hands went up. Everyone busy, few people productive. That tells us something about what we mean by productivity. One of the participants helped out with something like a dictionary definition of productivity: outputs per input. On that measure, the people in the room were undoubtedly being productive. They were creating output. But why weren't they feeling productive?

3) Making productivity human. One of the biggest insights for me about the talk I gave came when speaking to a participant afterwards: he - Julio, I think his name was! - said, 'You made productivity human.' This wasn't deliberate. In my work on productivity I'm looking simply for ways to help practically, but Julio had hit on something: one of the problems with all the productivity talk is that it doesn't feel human. It separates us from our real, human lives. That's the problem with the definition, and that's the way I was helping people with productivity. Not all outputs are equal. Productivity and that definition sound like they come from the factories. So, in some ways, does the idea of time management. That, I hadn't realised, is why focusing on time management, underneath, is a problem if we want to be productive.

If what we're really interested in is not output per input, but creating the outputs that are meaningful or important to us or to the world, then that requires humanity. Because making meaning is a human thing.

When I normally teach this content, the reason I suggest people don't focus on time management is less about humanity and more about control: time is out of our control. Instead, we can focus on other things. Things we can control. We can choose to focus on Choice Management, not time management. We can focus our attention on Attention Management. We can put our energy into Energy Management, change our attitude about time management by affecting our Attitude Management (see, for example, number 3, here). And, as I have learned from this writing practice, we can put habits at the heart of doing what matters to us with often surprising results.

Writing this, I can see how each of those things: choice, attention, energy, attitude and habits are so much more human than time. Each of them are things that are really ours. We might write that we can put 'our' time into things, but really it's not our time. It's just time, ticking by. And even though you could argue humans created it, we certainly can't manage it.

To be productive, then, we need a more human definition, and to choose to focus on things we can actually control.

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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

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