It’s time to drop the curtain on those pesky productivity pitfalls that leave you feeling like a hamster stuck on a wheel – you know, that nasty sensation of running as fast as you can but getting absolutely nowhere?
Like a recurring nightmare, my inbox is perpetually teeming with distressed cries echoing eerily similar sentiments: “MJ, I feel like I’m spiraling into a whirlpool of tasks. I’ve jumped headfirst into the self-improvement fray, adopted every time management technique under the sun, filled my world with to-do lists, quadrant prioritization, and frog-gobbling (don’t worry, it’s not as ominous as it sounds!), and I’ve even sworn off my beloved Netflix marathons. Yet, here I am, drowning in a sea of unfinished tasks, the ghost of my productivity laughing in my face. How do I shake off this nefarious specter?”
So, my fellow productivity enthusiasts, brace yourselves as we plunge headfirst into the abyss of time management woes and unearth the three elusive reasons why, despite pouring your heart and soul into productivity, you’re still teetering on the edge of a mental breakdown.
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The Quest For Productivity Started With a Romance
Well, a romance novel anyway. I started working on Creative Clock after I met with one of my clients from my content editing author clients, who really moved me. She was almost in tears from the moment we got on the call. The third book in her romance novel series was overdue. She had a marketing team and audiobook narrator waiting on her. Fans were eager for the next installment, and her bank account needed the payday.
“I just can’t keep going like this,” she said. “My son is mad at me. Things with my husband are strained, and I’m near exhaustion from trying to balance it all. I know my business can be successful. But something’s gotta give.”
That’s a typical story I hear all the time. But here’s the part that really got me going.
When I asked her what she’d already done to try to solve the problem, she told me she’d hired another coach, a supposed leader in the productivity industry. She’d tried to work through his program but kept hitting walls. When she asked him for help, he said, “She just wasn’t trying hard enough. She needed more discipline if she wanted to be a success.”
<angry face and gestures> OMG
Leaving aside for a moment that that coach’s approach fails the human being test, here’s why it’s wrong from a productivity standpoint and why she (and probably you) are failing at mastering your productivity
Reason 1: If I Just Fix This One Thing, All My Productivity Woes Will Go Away
Recently I took my car into the shop because my headlights were flickering. I’m not the world’s most mechanical person, but this one seemed somewhat straightforward. I must have had a headlight failing.
Not so fast, my mechanic said. A whole bun could cause flickering headlights, including a bad battery and a failing alternator. A completely different set of underlying causes could cause battery weakness.
When people strike out to tackle their productivity, they often assume the flickering headlight is due to the bulb instead of considering the rest of the system. My SEO tool tells me that one of the number one searches people looking to boost how much they get done is “Time Management hacks.”
Except, their productivity issue might not be time management.
“Getting more done is about managing your time and priorities better.” That’s a quote from the website of a famous productivity coach.
Ohhhh, it’s so simple. Why didn’t I think of that? <facepalm>
Productivity Management at its root IS about organizing and executing around priorities, but in that sentence is packed with a wallop of big, hairy things:
- What’s a priority?
- How do I figure out what my goals are to meet my desired future outcome?
- How do I make goals clear and specific but not too specific? Do I need short-term and long-term ones?
- What tasks should go into those goals?
- How do I break those tasks down? Do I need to break them down?
- How do I know what’s urgent and what’s not? How do I keep things from becoming crisis tasks?
- How do I organize anything, let alone everything?
- Once I know what I’m supposed to be working on, how do I work on it most efficiently? Do I need a system? What kind of system?
- Isn’t executing what they did to poor wives of Kings back in the day?
- How do you master any of that?
And that’s before we even talk about things like focus, distractions, energy, and environments.
Productivity is like a puzzle. Multiple components must come together in the right mix to make you your most productive self. Miss one, get one wrong, and it can derail you. I’m sure this intuitively makes sense. But I think in practice when the internet is yelling at us just to focus, stop procrastinating, or write things down, it’s easy to forget.
There are several ways to break down the components of productivity. With my clients, I like to look at five dimensions coupled with four additional subcomponents around energy and have bundled them all into one productivity style. The facets of my assessment look at the areas of time, task engagement, goal orientation, focus prioritization, and deadline necessity. The subcomponents for energy examine when and what environment brings out your best.
Understanding these components and your strengths and weaknesses around each is crucial to implement any productivity management system successfully.
And equally important is understanding that you have an inborn predisposition to how you naturally approach each of these. For example, recent research from van Eerde, W., Rutte, C. G., & Spanser, J. showed that people predisposed toward structured task management (in other words, whether they lived for the todo list or managed their life on sticky notes) successfully managed information overload better functioning at higher productivity when in that situation.
Reason 2: But I Implemented a System!
Imagine you are sick, feeling a lack of energy, and you’re always thirsty, so you go to the doctor. Don’t worry, the doctor says, because there’s a brand new state-of-the-art drug on the market that he’s going to prescribe. He shows you all the excellent reviews the drug has for giving people energy. This is fantastic, your answer to feeling better. Except for a couple of weeks in, you’re feeling worse. So you go to a different doctor who runs tests revealing that you have diabetes, and the drug you’ve been taking, while the most advanced on the market, is for heart disease.
This is what happens when you implement a productivity management system that isn’t targeted to how YOU manage the facets of productivity we talked about above.
It’s not that people are trying to swindle you by selling you productivity management systems that don’t work. It’s that they’re missing a super crucial ingredient – you.
The program my client was working through specifically targeted helping her with task management and organization. She was writing down every task she had to get done, logging them in the task tool, mapping them into the systems task structure, and meticulously following the plan the app spit out.
Except that wasn’t her problem. In fact, not only was she not getting her novel finished, the program she’d chosen was killing her creativity to the point she was spending more time revising the chapters she did complete.
Taking the wrong medicine to fix your productivity can kill your creativity.
Reason 3: Your failure is because you’re lazy, undisciplined, and not trying hard enough
This is one that really frosts my cookies. I started my coaching business as a content editor working with authors. Most creative people I work with have a full-time jobs and are squeezing in their passion around the rest of their lives. They are incredibly motivated and some of the most disciplined people I know.
I can’t drive this home enough – Trying harder is not the answer.
Studies repeatedly show (Duckworth, A. L., Milkman, K. L., & Laibson, D. (2018) that willpower is not a sustainable solution for long-term change.
In fact, research supports that the best way to make a change is to construct it to go with your flow. (Gartner, B. Health Psychology Review, 9(3), 277-295
So what does that mean for productivity?
The five dimensions of productivity above aren’t black and white. You aren’t either good at task management or bad. Instead, you have a trait, an approach, associated with that facet you naturally tend toward – a way to work within that dimension that will work with you naturally instead of against you.
And if you are creative, it’s probably different than how many productivity systems are designed.
For example, some of us are big picture people. We love big ideas and possibilities. Others can’t get enough of the details. People with these different natural dispositions need a different approach to productivity. Limiting big picture thinkers zaps their creativity. They tend to spin through ideation quicker, need a way to harness all their extra ideas, and want to get going quickly. They also need more time on the back for quality review of details. Similarly, detail-oriented people need to gather and know everything before starting, but their production time tends to be quicker because they aren’t filling in the gaps as they go.
When we assessed what was going on with her productivity, what we learned was that she had a creativity problem with needing her writing to be perfect that was masquerading as a procrastination issue, coupled with a severe energy depletion caused partly by her task management approach and partly due to the research strategy she had in place.
How To Supercharge Your Productivity?
So, what should you do instead? Productivity is like solving a puzzle with multiple components. Merely focusing on one aspect or relying on sheer willpower is like using the wrong tool for the job—it won’t lead to long-term success. Instead, you MUST embrace a tailored approach that fits your natural inclinations and integrates with your routine. So, let’s ditch the cookie-cutter solutions and discover the productivity style that suits you best. It’s time to unlock your potential and conquer your to-do list with flair!
