Half-a-dozen Monkeys is about Productivity and Personal Development. It is about how I am learning to grow in both these areas, and how you can learn from this. But one thing struck me the other day – surely all of this depends on how you define “Productivity” and “Personal Development”. Over two posts, I shall look at how I define each of these – how does this fit with your definition?
For example, you may think of yourself as a ‘football fan’. For an American this means American Football, for a Brit this may mean Soccer or even Rugby, or if you are from Australia it could be Aussie Rules. What you want from a book on ‘how to improve your Football’ is very different depending on how define football.
Productivity is a bit more clean cut. Whilst it cover large portions of our life, we are still talking about the same concept. Let me break down ‘Productivity’ into what I consider its constituent parts:
1. Capturing what needs to be done;
2. Prioritising what has been captured;
3. Planning how these items are best completed;
4. Allotting time to doing these items;
5. Physically doing what needs to be done;
6. Ensuring things are done to a sufficient quality;
7. Ensuring things are done to the correct time frame;
8. Balancing the demands of quality and quantity;and
9. Fitting the above into the time you have available.
So basically we have a three stage process:
Not rocket science is it! And from this is it possible to arrive at a definition for what I consider ‘Productivity’? Yes. I can now write a sentence which for me defines what I write about, what I try and put into practice, and what I want to read about:
Productivity is discipline of the identification of tasks that need doing, the investigation of how best to undertake these tasks, and the ultimate completion of these tasks in the most efficient and timely manner.
This is by now means perfect, but with it I now have something I can use to focus my development, and something I can evolve over time.
How would you change this definition?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s sort of how I view productivity (I will sometimes call it personal productivity to distinguish it from the old industrial idea of productivity). My only addition would me my motivations for living a productive life. I do productivity to give myself time and energy to do what really matters, rather than just blindly doing things.
I wrote a post covering exactly what productivity means to me if you want to read more of my thoughts on this.
Hi James – thanks for the comment. What you say in your article about the focus of productivity having to be on the things you want to do, rather than machine-like-stuff-processing is very true. It can be far too easy to think that getting loads done is the same as having a productive day.
Rich
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