Broadly speaking productivity is the measurement of how much you get done how quickly. We want to see our personal productivity rise, especially as we’re trying to achieve greater and greater Goals. It gives us a great sense of satisfaction and achievement to get more done in less time, as it should. The productivity trap is sprung when we begin to get addicted to checking off items on our to-do list.
It’s almost a universal thing. Ask anyone who keeps a to-do list of some kind if they’ve ever written something down on their to-do list AFTER it’s been done just so they can check it off? We’ve all done this. We really like to check the boxes. It shows us we’ve done something. We’ve made progress towards our Goals, and done a great deal of work.
Maybe.
Sometimes we’ve got a really large number of tasks on our t0-do lists. It can be overwhelming just looking at the quantity. When it does get bad, we tend to want to start doing the easy tasks before the important tasks. The easy ones take the least amount of time, so you can get more done in less time that it takes to do one large task. That makes you more productive, right? What if those easy tasks are low priority, low impact tasks? Is it really productive to do 10 of those instead of one high priority, high impact task?
Sometimes those easier tasks are important to your overall Goals. In fact, sometimes you have to do several easier tasks as part of an overall bigger task. Sometimes you have to do them before you can move on to bigger tasks. The important thing that makes you truly productive is to be working on the right things at the right time. That’s being effective. Being effective is the highest form of productivity.
It’s far more critical to our success to be doing the most important thing on our list. The thing we have to determine is what makes one time more important than any other? There’s two factors that go into that. Impact and time. What’s the impact of doing that task? Does it make other tasks easier? Does it move you forward the most, or is it the next task in a sequential list? Does it have to be done before you can do anything else?
Next, how much time will it take to do the task? This one is trickier, because this is where temptation is the greatest. If you have two or more tasks that are critical or of equal importance, how do you decide what to do? Do you do the quickest one just to make sure something gets done? Or do you tackle the one that takes the most time, jeopardizing getting anything done at all? Unless it’s impossible to do the larger task in the time you have, or you have to keep going until it’s done instead of just picking it up tomorrow, you should always tackle the bigger task. It’s far too easy to put it off because it’s a large task.
That’s the real trap. Letting larger tasks get put off because we think we can’t finish it. We trade that work and sense of accomplishment for the quick fix of adrenaline and pleasure that comes from checking off that box. It gets to be like an addiction, because we tell ourselves we’re really making progress, when we’re just spinning our wheels.
