Category: Being Productive

It’s one thing to use your willpower to get a task done. It’s another thing to use your willpower to get the same task done at the most aligned time.

It’s one thing to plan a night out with friends. It’s another thing to plan a night out with friends who are completely aligned with your energy going into that night out.

It’s one thing to go to work and do your job. It’s another thing to fight for alignment with the place you work and the job you’re doing and the people you’re with.

Alignment is what allows you to get the same—if not more—done with less effort and/or in less time.

Alignment is what unlocks a feeling of fulfillment, a sense of purpose, and/or a level of vibrancy/joy from something that otherwise might feel like an obligation, task, or chore.

Alignment is the good fight worth fighting because being mis-aligned is the completely counterproductive act of fighting against yourself.

Enough of that, dear reader.

It’s time to point your time, energy, and effort towards bigger and better things… more efficient and productive things… more meaningful and memorable things…

…And a great place to start is with what you’re going to do after you finish reading this short article.

Think about how much time you can spend staring unflinchingly at a screen that’s displaying an algorithmic refined series of “interesting” media.

Contrast this with how hard it is for you to concentrate for even a few minutes on a project you don’t give two cares about and it’d appear as though you were inspecting two completely different concentrations from two completely different people.

…Looking purely at their faces without any knowledge of which task they were engaged in and you’d say one had ADHD and the other was some kind of focus machine.

Which illustrates an important point to understand about us humans.

Concentration isn’t so much a measure of a person’s skill or ability to concentrate… it’s a measure of how aligned they are with something that’s interesting to them.

Because while, yes, algorithms are excellent at endlessly displaying an onslaught of personalized interests designed specifically to maintain our attention… there’s another tool that’s even more powerful.

One that’s backed by the most complex object in the known Universe.

Can you guess what it is?

…The human imagination backed by the human brain.

Within which there are approximately 1 million billion synapses (the links between nerve cells). Hard to grasp, I know. But if you were to count these synapses one per second, it would take about 32 million years to complete.

This is what’s between your ears right now. And all it takes to unleash the unfathomable power of this gift are the correct keys that are the interests of your life. Discover these and the superficial value that most algorithms produce will quickly become obsolete.

…Discover these and you’ll never have a concentration problem again.

Inertia is the natural tendency of objects in motion to stay in motion and objects at rest to stay at rest, unless a force causes the velocity to change.

Translated to human behavior, it begs the following questions:

• Going from rest to motion will require a force… one that’s enough to get you up even when you’re sleepy… even when you’re feeling lazy… even when you don’t feel like it… what is that force for you? …Don’t know? This might be precisely why you aren’t producing / performing / living the way you want to be. Identify and cultivate your “force” and watch how your world changes.

• There are more forces working against us than there are forces working with us. Starting with earthly laws such as gravity and friction and extending all the way to modern movement killers such as passive entertainment and social media—with plenty of other examples in between. What forces are actually working with us, though? What keeps us moving when everything else is trying to bring us to a halt? How can we better align with those fewer and more far between forces?

• Going from motion to rest is easier than going from rest to motion. In other words, starting back up once you’ve stopped is harder than keeping momentum going throughout your day. How can you stack and align your tasks so that less energy is required overall? Figure this out and you’ll have more saved energy, which equals more life that can be spent for other (possibly more important) things.

If you wake up and “wing it”—you’ll always fall victim to what’s urgent and distractionary.

If while you’re winging it, however, you discover there’s something important that you missed, could’ve done better, or did too late… and you create a reminder or system for next time…

Then suddenly you have a strategy.

And the next morning, when you wake up and follow it—you’ll likely notice a few things:

1. You’ll feel a pull to go back to what’s urgent and distractionary. Quick dopamine will always have an appeal, but at the expense of doing what’s meaningful long-term. Keep your prior lessons at the forefront of your mind.
2. You’ll discover something else that’s important that needs to get prioritized. And so the iteration goes. Slowly but surely, you’re strategy will grow and improve and become a productivity force to be reckoned with.
3. You’ll start to feel a little better about what you got done during that day. Quick dopamine wears off and leaves you feeling empty. Getting done important stuff leaves you with a lasting feeling of goodness.

Here’s the thing: we all start by winging it.

…It’s how we figure things out when we don’t have any experience or guidance to reference or fall back on.

But, continuing to wing it is a choice.

And not turning learned experiences into a strategy is a choice.

The question is: What kind of choices are you making in your day-to-day?

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P.s. I started uploading quotes from The Win Within by Bert Mandelbaum today. You can grab a copy and read along here.

When I asked two of my co-workers (whom I have weekly meetings with) if there was anything they’d like to add to the meeting minutes or general structure of how we meet… one of them said, “I think we should say something nice to each other…” in a half-joking, mostly serious kind of way.

And you know what…

We’ve been doing it ever since and I think it’s one of the best overall sections of the meeting. And I don’t just mean this in a silly kind of way… I mean this in a connection-forming, bond-deepening, mood-boosting-which-mood-boosts-every-single-other-person-we-interact-with-which-is-excellent-for-business-too… kind of way.

And you know what…

As tacky as it might sound to the super busy, high performing professional… the energy is met by the energy that’s brought. If you put some quality energy and thought into what you say… what you’ll be stunned to find… is that other people will bring some quality energy and thought into what they say as well.

This type of busy is meant to describe being so busy… that it’s awful.

Being busy is tough enough… it relentlessly sucks you out of the present moment (where life is lived), can fill you with anxiety (about how you’re going to get everything done), and makes it really hard to get important work done (because the urgent stuff keeps nagging for your attention).

But, there’s another perspective to busy.

…Being busy can also be a blessing.

It means you’ve filled your day with tasks and activities that you get to do—versus being left homeless on the street with no family, no connections, no resources, and no life options…

And rather than being awfully busy—eliciting a type of misery that follows you throughout your day into and out of every task… what if you tried being happily busy instead?

All those tasks you have to do for your family…? You get to do.

All those chores you have to do at home…? You get to do.

All those projects you have to finish at work…? You get to do.

All you have to do now is slow down, add a little deliberate to your day, and fill yourself with gratitude along the way.

Happily busy is an exponentially more beautiful place to be.

A tip from a friend on what to do when you’re feeling overwhelmed:

“The best advice I ever got from my 5th grade teacher stuck with me until this day. If you have a list of 10 things to do, don’t look at them all at once. Pick one and go from there. We’re only one person and if we train our minds to slow down when we have a meticulous or time consuming project, I find it relaxes the anxiety of feeling like I’ll never get it done. Hope this helps.”

I particularly like this idea of not looking at them all at once.

…Sure, make your list and get yourself organized on what all needs to get done. And sure, prioritize so you can distinguish between what needs to get done, what you want to get done, what doesn’t really need to get done, what can be delegated, and what can be deleted. And sure, take a quick look at it all.

But after that… stop.

Enough looking at the list.

The longer you look at the list, the more likely the list will paralyze you to inaction (and lead you to a modern day distraction).

Just pick something.

Go from there.

Train your mind to slow down.

Having a lot to get done is the modern day dilemma.

Getting one thing done at a time with a calm, clear intention is the modern day solution.