Slow down to do more

In a time where most people like me, selfdevelopment geeks, productivity lovers, and all the likes, clearly long to share our top productivity hacks, I am going against the tide slightly.

Whilst most of the people around me are bored and very vocal about being bored, I have never been busier. It’s a good problem to have, and part of me feels like I should be grateful — don’t get me wrong, in a way I truly am.

However, I am also painfully aware that working until 8 pm every night when I wake up at 6 am can take a toll on your mental health and overall wellbeing. I think the realisation something had to change was when I looked at yet another article about how to be more productive when working from home. As someone who is incredibly productive and very much type-A, I feel like my real challenge these days is slowing down.

I have 1001 ideas flying through my head and little plans outside of choosing the next Netflix binge (anyone else finding cooking shows extremely soothing?) or moving from the desk to the sofa to the dinner table for the fifteenth time.

Take it from someone who called herself a selfdevelopment guinea pig. There is an anecdote I think is very fitting when it comes to this topic. Six wise blind men are trying to describe an elephant.

The first man touches the elephant’s ear and says that an elephant is like a thick blanket. The second touches a tusk and decides that the animal is sharp and pointy. The third touches the leg and concludes that an elephant is like a tree trunk. The fourth touches the side and believes it’s like a wall. The fifth feels the tail and imagines a rope. And the sixth man puts his hands on the elephant’s head, which reminds him of a rock.

They all have different perspectives, and though none of them is exactly wrong, each misses the full picture by focusing only on particular parts.

When it comes to productivity and being better at the WFH life, we must be able to shift our perceptive and our priorities. Being more productive is not about being more efficient, it’s about creating a better balance.

Don’t mistake goals for tasks

I had this incredibly naive idea that launching a digital magazine was going to be one task to tick off my to-do list. Oh boy, I wish I hadn’t been that wrong about that. Launching a digital magazine is a combination of goals, objectives, strategies, priorities and overall tasks.

We all know what a goal is, yes each goal can be broken down into a series of objectives, which will be the core building blocks

The strategies are the collection of tasks that you’ll need to prioritise in order to complete your objectives (yet, it’s much more complex than you may have thought at first).

Identify the most effective tasks that will make your strategy a success in order to achieve a particular goal, then highlight the top one task you can focus on every day to get closer to that goal.

In his book Get Smart!, author Brian Tracy introduces the Law of Three. The Law of Three is one great method. The Law of Three argues that just three of your tasks will represent 90 percent of your results. The key, therefore, is to identify and focus all your work on these three things

Which strategies do I need to set in place to achieve this goal? What tasks does each strategy require?