How To Be Truly Productive

Being productive
Without an understanding of your greater goals in life, it can sometimes feel like you’re going nowhere.

What’s the point of being more productive if you don’t have an overall reason to be productive? Knowing your life’s purpose may help.

Like most people out there engaged in any kind of work or business, I’m always looking for ways to be more productive. Do more with less, as the mantra goes.

Like most people, I constantly juggle business, family life, communities of friends, and some spiritual and creative pursuits. Invariably a couple of them get short shrift in the big bundle of obligations that is our daily life.

And like many other people, to make sense of it all, I’ve tried just about every system out there – from traditional time management tools, to exotic new ones like Getting Things Done, The 4-Hour Workweek, Never Check Email In The Morning, and several others.

Heck, I even ghost wrote and helped publish a book on productivity. And none of them really worked for me.

Not because they were bad; in fact, they were all quite good. But they all involved systems, and something was always missing to keep me on the straight and narrow of productivity.

I was recently reading a book on the general subject by the Get It Done Guy, Stever Robbins, and something clicked. What was always missing was a purpose. Not just a purpose to get things done. I had plenty of those – but an overall life purpose.

A meaning. A reason. A profound understanding of why I was doing what I was doing.
Robbins pointed out that all actions and plans should begin with an understanding of your life purpose and how it affects everything you do.

Now, despite my rep, I’m actually a fairly philosophical guy. I think a lot about life purpose. So Robbins’ point that you shouldn’t do anything that doesn’t help your life purpose really resonated with me. It explained why I felt so bad sometimes doing stuff I hated – and of course wasn’t very productive because of it. It clashed with my underlying sense of why I was put on this earth in the first place.

(I won’t tell you what that is – it’s private. Besides, it’s irrelevant.)

I’m not saying you should run out and try his system, which is much more complex than simply understanding your purpose. But, while you’re constantly trying to do more and wrangle it all into some system that still leaves you a life, you might want to begin by thinking what that life is all about in the first place.

Is it money, or status, or just neat stuff? Or is it to raise a family, be creative, or to conquer cancer?
Whatever, it should guide everything you do. That is true productivity.