The #1 Productivity Tool You Already Possess

Do you ever feel as though you don’t have enough hours in the day to complete everything on your plate? Somehow you continue to add more to it each day.

Slowly as you continue to add more activities to complete you start to get overwhelmed and frustrated with everything you want to accomplish that it feels as if you’re not making any progress at all, you’re too busy herding cats. Eventually, you just throw your hands up and resign yourself to the fact none of it will ever get done and you’re better off binge watching TV instead.

You’ve spent years studying all the productivity systems, get enticed by the newest ones out there and learned some great tools to be super productive. You’ve implemented a few of the tips and tactics but you’re not consistent with them at all. You set your schedule and defined, specific, measurable actions to take each day and by Tuesday you’ve blown it out of the water and are totally off track.

Don’t get up on being productive, you can do this. What you’re missing is the key ingredient to ensure you’re super productive in your life.

There is a huge difference between being productive and being busy.

Being productive is getting the activities done in your life that matter and make small incremental changes to your life every day, every time you complete them.

Being busy is just filling time, just doing a ton of stuff because you believe it “should be done.”
You’re Missing The Purpose Behind The Action

What’s missing from your productivity system is a purpose. A great big vision and why you want to achieve all these actions.

Most of the time when I find a client is (or myself) is struggling to stick to a schedule is because we’ve filled our time up with actions that don’t matter if they get done or not.

Some people call these small rocks, space fillers, dead time or mindless tasks.

Small rocks is where the action happens, where the real change comes from. If you move enough small rocks and stack them into a pile, eventually you’ll have a mountain of accomplishment.

Without the leverage to pick them up and move them, they’ll stay where they’re at and litter your path with obstacles.

Big Rocks on the other hand are life changing actions (starting a family, a new job, a new business, a new volunteer opportunity, etc.) and are just as important as small rocks (sometimes more important). We only have so many of these big rocks we can do aat a time without losing our sanity (areas of focus.)

They key to moving either is leverage, the purpose behind why we want to move them. The Fuel to your fire.
Scheduling Won’t Make You Productive

Not every rock in your way needs to be moved, some are meant to be sidestepped and left behind (or delegated to someone else.)

Most of us struggle deciding what to schedule, what to put on hold and what to let go of.

This is where knowing your purpose comes into play.

No matter how hard you schedule and plan, how detailed you get that plan. Without the proper fire and fuel behind it with a great purpose, you’ll end up in the weeds before you know it.

Also, the most mundane tasks become super easy once you understand the purpose behind them.

How many times have you told yourself you’re going to do something (like get to the gym bright and early.) A week later you’re telling yourself the same story but haven’t made it into the gym yet.

The reason why is that you don’t have enough purpose behind getting into the gym to complete the task. Losing weight isn’t a great motivator most of the time on exercise programs. Examine it for how you’ll feel, how much more energy, stamina and focus you’ll achieve.

Finding your purpose is tough, we all start with surface level ideas about why we want to accomplish something. This is great to get us started but not enough to keep us going for the long haul.

For real sustained action you need to find the real kernel moving you forward, what you really want to achieve.

For today, pick one activity that either bores you to tears or you desperately believe you want to accomplish but aren’t doing anything about.

Go to a place you can reflect on this for a few minute and dig in. Start making a list, a HUGE list of all the reasons of why you want this to happen.

when you feel as if you’re running out of steam, go grab a coffee a drink of water do some breathing and come back.

Continue to write this list, do this for 3 sessions, it will take this long for the first few times you do this. Don’t skimp and think one iteration is enough, it’s not.

Around item #60-#70 you’ll see the real reason right in front of you, it will stop you in your tracks and you’ll get that magical “ah-ha” moment. Don’t get frustrated if it doesn’t happen, it just means it’s not an activity your fired up about and should consider either abandoning it or modifying it until you find the purpose behind it.

As humans we only do things we want to do long term. Sure, we can do anything for a short period of time, but if we want real life changing actions we need to put some fire behind that to keep us going and the only fuel for that fire is a solid purpose of why it MUST happen.

Take a few minutes to reflect on this, write down your reasons and let it sink in.

I appreciate the time you’ve taken to read this and take the actions.

Josh

P.S. are you interested in some additional thoughts on this post? Head over to my YouTube Channel and see the video about this post, you can find it here

Originally published at www.igniteyourawakening.com on June 7, 2016.