The Unsexy Word Productivity Can’t Ignore
When you’re lucky enough to have an IV bag of inspiration coursing through your veins, you don’t need any help getting things done. No coach, no book, no advice, no motivational posters matter at that point.
You simply hang on to the reins of revelation and ride it for as long as you can.
Sadly those days are about as rare as steak tartare.
Far too often we’re up against the slodge of boring days, the days we can’t tell apart, and the days we won’t remember. Face it, most days seem about as eventful as a mixer at a monastery.
And yet, your success depends on getting stuff done even when you don’t feel like it.
The best way to do that is to embrace productivity’s runt of the litter: process.
Process is what happens when inspiration isn’t looking. It sits at the opposite end of the see-saw from “When I feel like it.”
Note: Processes Suck*
It’s not that we don’t know the benefits of a process, it’s that creating a process elicits about as much fun as “Root Canal Mondays.”
Just look at the synonyms for process: procedure, operation, undertaking, method, system, technique.
Go ahead, throw up in your mouth a little bit. It’s ok.
Creating a process means you have to figure out what works for you outside of anything you’ve read or heard someone else do.
Whoa whoa whoa. I have to DO work to figure out how to do more work? WTF?!
Yup. Because if not, we leave everything up to emotion. And what happens when we leave everything to impulsive decision making? More anxiety-laced catastrophes than we would ideally like to face. Like this one:
Not only did that photo make you laugh, it has a certain component we’re all attracted to, the human factor. The part of us that keep us from being C3PO.
Screw the script, let’s improv.
Some of the best stories in life (at least in my life) were filled with all the antonyms of process: disorganized, helter skelter, haphazard, chaotic, improvise.
As I pointed out last week, we love to not give a shit. We love to be partying on the cobble-stoned streets of Cadiz, Spain during carnaval without knowing where we’re going to sleep that night.
Improvising, after all, is what makes us unique. It magnifies our ability to adapt on the spot. But it’s an adaptation from what? Peel back the onion of that question and you’ll find at the core is some sort of process.
When it comes to productivity, our problem is that we somehow still think that deep down we are different than everyone else, that when we want to focus, we can just turn on a switch and get it done but we just don’t want to or choose not to because of mystery reasons 1 thru 14.
While there is a time a place to be flying by the seat of your pants, you first need a pair of pants.
Process 1st. Adaptation 2nd.