1+1: Activity vs productivity + 6 great questions to ask yourself

Here’s one leadership idea and one resource I’ve found beneficial this week:

1 idea: Activity vs productivity 

When I was writing my first book, I faced the same challenge every morning: do I respond to emails or try and make progress on this book?

The book was important to me, but progress was hard to measure. I might spend 20 minutes finding the right word or phrase I needed to turn around a clunky paragraph, only to delete the whole thing a few hours later. I might have a chapter that I knew needed reorganizing, but I had no idea how to pull it off. Meanwhile, my email beckoned to me. Every minute I invested there shrunk that number of unread messages. Maybe I could even get to zero today! The concrete progress was tantalizing.

Responding to email in a timely manner was certainly a good goal for me, but it was not a great one. Writing the book was that great goal. Yet every morning, I had to fight the temptation to address email first.

Robert Brault captures this tension well when he says,

Writing wasn’t hard for me because I lacked the resources or skills to do it. It was challenging because I had so many more compelling alternatives. I could clean my office, read some articles, or make another Excel spreadsheet. I had a clear path forward in each of these areas and enjoyed the dopamine rush that came with progress in each activity.

Activity on its own is a poor measure of success; a far better measure is productivity. As the saying goes,

For me, “the right things” meant staying on the path of book-writing even when it seemed I was taking two steps forward and one step back. It meant learning to tune out the internal critic that chastised me for not being further along in that project. It even meant learning how to rest during my day—to consciously reduce my activity—so that I could refresh myself and boost my overall productivity.

Doing a little bit of the right thing beats doing a lot of the wrong thing.

Don’t get caught up in winning the wrong game.

***

• What is the great goal that you need to focus on?

• Productive people are masters of ignoring the unimportant. What unimportant things are most distracting for you?

• What would need to change in your schedule or decision-making to enable you to focus more energy on your great goal?

1 resource: 6 great questions to ask yourself

As you contemplate what your great goal is, it helps to step back and survey the terrain of your life for a moment. These six questions are written for the midpoint of your career, but they’re thought-provoking at any stage of life.

PS: When you ask questions you don’t want answers to…