Are you productive?
Often when a client answers “no” to this question, I ask: did you pick up the kids from school? Did you get the shopping done? Did you finish that report your boss needed? Did you update your website? Or any number of tasks that they have done over the course of the week. Of course the answer is “yes” and so I have to point out that they are, in fact, very productive people.
That actually makes them feel worse, though. Because often when we complain about “not being productive” what we mean is that we are not making progress towards goals we have set for ourselves, whether that is a business goal (“make X amount of profit in this quarter”) or a personal one (“work out three times a week at the gym”). We’re frustrated by that and insist that we are “not productive” when, in fact, you are just not accomplishing a specific objective.
There are a lot of reasons why you might be falling short, but I find the most common on is very simple: overwhelm.
My colleague Gina and I realized we had hit that point earlier this month. We are both in the process of transforming our author careers in ways that are exciting and challenging (more on that another time) but in the meantime, we still have businesses to tend to and work to get done. Were we productive? We sure were! Were we managing to hit the goals we had set for ourselves with our new ventures? Ehhhh…not so much.
It was time for some project management! That’s right, being MY friend means you get to do all sorts of exciting things with me! BRING OUT THE CHECK LISTS! PARTY TIME!
…okay, I realize that not everyone finds that exciting. But bear with me: how would you feel if you spent half a morning and streamlined everything? I mean everything: all your business, personal, hobby, and wellness goals. Everything!
That is exactly what we did.
The ability to do so easily and quickly was a founding principle I followed when creating my Personal Projects Management™ (PPM) method of productivity. The worst thing you can do in your search for ultimate, holistic productivity is create list of “things to do” and then start shoehorning them into your calendar. You will fill up all the empty space and then realize that you are super busy while also overwhelmed and also not accomplishing your goals. It’s the worst trifecta you can win.
So how did we avoid doing that?
1. Brain dump: The day before, we sat down on our own and wrote out everything we are doing, want to do, and need to do. There was no particular order or structure to it, although related things tended to be clumped together because that’s how brains work.
2. Sorting priorities: A key component of PPM is to create “buckets” to sort things into ( call them “guideposts”). A lot of planning systems get you to prioritize individual tasks (“pick up kids from school” and “pay taxes” would both be high priority tasks, for instance). Not PPM! Instead we asked ourselves, what are the guiding visions of our lives? We took everything we had written out on our brain dumps and sorted them into the “buckets” they belonged to, and then named those buckets. The min priority is that everything fit in a bucket.
These guideposts (or lodestars, or goalposts, I don’t care what you call them) are the most important things in your life.
I ended up with three main buckets: my writing career, my Task Mistress business, and wellness. For you it might be parenthood, entrepreneurship, church/faith, and your hobby.
What does not fit into guidepost is very likely something you don’t need to be spending your time on, no matter how important other people think it is or isn’t. Volunteering for the PTA might look like something that is an important part of parenthood, but if it is a time suck that is preventing you from spending time with your actual children, or is draining you so much that you can’t invest energy into your church/faith community or tend to your hobby, is it really necessary? I can’t answer that for you, of course, but I think I don’t need to. You know the answer.
3. Defining our goals: This is misnamed, because really it’s not about goals, it’s about projects. This is project management, after all! Most people are used to thinking in terms of goals so if that’s easier for you, tha’ts fine. In practice, what this looked like for me looking at what I needed to do for each of my guideposts. For my Task Mistress business, that was a list of three primary projects: the All the Tasks Fit to Print newsletter, my services, and my YouTube channel.
That’s it. Three goals, or projects.
Already, things are looking more manageable, right? It’s not just a long list of tasks to complete.
4. Breaking down the project: This is where I dug into the details of each project. I outlined what I needed to do for my newsletter, for instance: write it, create a soc-med graphic, schedule it to post/email, post link on my Patreon, copy to Medium five days after posting, share on socmed a week after posting. Once those steps are identified, it’s easy to drop them into a calendar. I won’t accidently skip a step or run up against a deadline unexpectedly. I put those as repeating tasks into my google calendar…but not yet. First I need to go back and look at the other two projects, “services” and “YouTube.” I had to break out those into their own steps, some of which are recurring like the newsletter, and some of which have a deadline (like product creation, for instance).
The point of doing it this way is so that when you have it written out, you can step back and look at them all together. You can see that one project is taking up a disproportionate amount of time, or that it is something that you can easily schedule in around other things. Sometimes we had to ask each other for help figuring out the steps of a project, or where a paraticular project might live. Gina eventually came up with a separate guidepost for “networking” because all the networking she does fits under multiple of her other guideposts concurrently. You might decide to pull out “marketing” as a primary project and instead break up marketing according to the business or goal it relates to (this is what I did, as my marketing for the Task Mistress business and the marketing for my author platform are two very different beasts).
From there, Gina took the tasks under each project and wrote them all out in her paper planner, while I did a version of that using Google Calendar. Adjustments were made.
And….that’s IT! That’s what we did. No really, that’s pretty much it.
If you follow the steps above, you will get clarity about the things you are trying to accomplish, and how much time and energy they really take. It’s possibly you might realize that you have to let some things go, or you might find that you are over-complicating a project’s tasks unnecessarily. The key here is to give you a full-picture view of what is going on in your life so you can control it without feeling overwhelmed or hopeless.
If you like how this works for you, check out my Personal Projects Mangement™ system, which will walk you through this whole process with explanations, worksheets, and advice.