Yesterday was an incredibly productive day for me and the day before was considerably less productive.
I stopped for a second to think about this and it occurred to me that the reason I was more productive yesterday was that I was doing things that had quantifiable outcomes that I could track. The day before, almost nothing I did had a quantifiable outcome. I then started to think about video games.
Take a moment to think of your favorite video game. If you are not a gamer, think of the game on your cell phone that takes up some time when you are on the subway or in line at the bank. I would argue that every one of those games has a task that you complete that leads to harder tasks and yet your tools remain the same. Shoot, jump, duck etc. No matter how many variations there are, you still end up in a position of organizing, eliminating, or avoiding. Sound like anything else you do?
That's right, true believer.
Email.
Think about the user interface of email. Something comes at you, usually a question or a batch of information, and you either respond, avoid, organize or eliminate it. Most of the time with a click. It's like a video game. The interesting thing is that just like a video game, it's easy to convince yourself that your doing something worthwhile when all you're doing is clicking some buttons and that's where the illusion of productivity comes in.
It's certainly an accomplishment to clear an inbox, but if all you did was send replies and not engage the other person or ship anything yourself, isn't it just a sophisticated game of brickbreaker?
Yesterday I made it a point to send out emails with tasks as well as respond, I made phone calls and took phone calls that had tasks attached to them, and I only worked on the things that had quantifiable outcomes. As a result I got a lot done.
Take a little time today to identify which tasks are actually producing something and which are creating the illusion of productivity and you'll be amazed at how much more you get done. Feel free to comment on what you produced today. I look forward to hearing from you.
Excelsior!
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