Focus vs Productivity

As my eyes fluttered open, my mind seemed to boot up almost immediately.

The list of things on my to-do list streamed across my mind like a high-speed train.

Then another collection of thoughts came in.

• "You have all these things to do"

• "You'd better get going"

• "Go! Go! Go!"

Like a demented sergeant major, my inner critic wanted to take the reins. Focusing all its attention on how much there was to do and how useless I would be if I didn't get it all done.

Just to clarify the context for this story is that this all happened at about 4am (Yes! In the morning)

Generally, these days, my sleep isn't disturbed in this way but every so often I have a few days like this. Probably the full moon or something!

But no matter what time I wake up, the ranting of my mind regarding proposed productivity levels is usually there at some point between waking and arriving at my desk.

Sometimes it kicks off in the shower or perhaps on my morning walk.

It presents me with all the things I should get done that day. The list is generally ridiculous, and the result is invariably me feeling overwhelmed.

Perhaps you can relate to this way of starting the day. An almost predictable routine of the mind.

• Propose a huge list of things which should be done

• Massive overwhelm. Mine feels like someone sat on my chest.

• Lots of procrastination and not a lot getting done

Fortunately, with awareness we can start to see this game of the inner critic with its unreasonable expectations. We can start to experience those heavy feelings of overwhelm differently. Understanding their source as thoughts rather than task list is profound.

But here is something else I have seen recently. I hope you find this shift in perspective helpful.

This week I have been working on my new course called "Authentic Content Creation & Repurposing with AI". In order to share this wonderful offer with the world, there is a fair bit of tech, emails and website stuff to get done.

My usual way to tackle this would be to decide in advance how long the project would take and then beat myself up when it turned out that I had completely underestimated the time scales for the task. If you are familiar with that way of approaching your working day, please read on.

Because here’s a helpful perspective shift, I experienced recently. One that I hope will help you as it has already helped a couple of my clients.

So, as I began to consider this project, I thought, "What would it be like to think about my work in terms of focus rather than productivity?" In other words, quality of time and attention spent on something rather than how much I get done.

This realisation is a culmination of my exploration of the inside out nature of life and finding that I am more inclined towards my thinking to be in the present moment rather than the future. The thing is we human beings are exceptionally poor at telling the future and that includes estimating how much we can get done in a given period.

Generally, those poor estimations are based on what we think we "should" get done and we all know who is running the show there don't we? The utterly unreasonable inner critic. You know that voice in your head that is your harshest taskmaster. The one that says you are worth squat unless you clear that list which covers two sides of your ring bound notebook.

But here is what I noticed as I aligned with focus rather than productivity. I felt a real sense of success. I focused clear and measurable amounts of time on the task, and I noticed that could be a measure of success rather than getting it all done.

The course and its underpinning technology have a lot of moving parts, and it has taken a lot more time to finish it than I could have ever “made up”. But what I can see clearly is that I have focused on it. That feels good. It feels aligned.

We literally cannot get everything done on that huge list and we are rubbish at knowing how much we can get done. But we can set an intention, focus on something and move in a direction relatively easily.

There have also been some bonuses to this shift towards focus over productivity. I have felt a lot less overwhelmed and a lot less distracted. It's like I made a commitment to my business this week, which was of a different, gentler nature.

Hopefully all the tech for the course is now working and you can take a look at the bottom of this article (the first lesson is free by the way).

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this way of looking at things.

Is focus over productivity a useful perspective shift?

Have a play and let me know how it goes

Find out about Authentic Content Creation & Repurposing with AI here