Busy or Productive? Lessons Learnt From a Simple Lack of Time
Why being busy isn’t an excuse for not being productive
I learnt this earlier on, but still messed up. I have been more busy than productive. After spending some time to reflect deeply, I realised that my simple lack of time stems from these underlying problems:
- My inability to say no
- Time Is Limited: Priorities
- Goal Hierarchy: Moving Towards Your End Goal
My inability to say “NO”
My inability to say no to others has led me to add more to my plate than I can handle. We all have the same 24 hours and I was spreading myself too thin. I decided to take up my friend’s offer to try out an occupation — all that while I was running my passions, which were completely unrelated pursuits. More often than not, I find myself agreeing to carry out favours for friends or friendly people. I would place them on top priority and in the end, I realise that my commitments were delayed.
Time is limited: Priorities
Knowing your priorities and acting under them are very different things. I know what I want to achieve but as we all know, we are easily swayed by instantly gratifying activities, be it binging the new episode of Loki every Wednesday, hanging out with friends often, or consuming short TikTok videos for hours. For me, I’m able to refrain from most of it because I always remind myself of a single truth: I am going to die. As gloom and doom, as it is, it is a certainty. We are all going to pass on, eventually. It can be with old age or through an accident, from large to minuscule.
Anything can happen in the next second that can alter your state of living and when that happens, your dreams of achieving and accomplishing your goals and priorities are over. I always ask myself: Do I want to die knowing that I watched Netflix, TikTok, and play games for the rest of my life, or do I want to die knowing I contributed to society and possibly could have made a difference to the world with my initiatives and projects.
Even becoming a better person than you were before, is a step forward in the right direction. If that’s the case, the answer is as clear as daylight, and keeping it in our frontal cortex constantly reminds us of our purpose on this earth; that will drive us to work hard.
Goal Hierarchy: Moving toward your end goal
Now, it is time to act. This was the most important factor that I neglected. I found myself striving each week to meet weekly targets and milestones. However, I realised that they were not progressive.
Thankfully, while I was reading up on a book called Grit by Angela Duckworth. She explains that there is a Goal Hierarchy.
An Abstract from the book:
Visualize your goal setting as a hierarchy with multiple levels.
Grit Chapter 4 — The Secret To Achieving Your Ultimate Goal Is…
The low-level goals are your day-to-day actions like writing emails, going to meetings, jogging for an hour, reading, etc. We do these goals as means to an end of a higher-level goal — such as executing a project. The higher the goal in this hierarchy the more abstract, general, and important it is.
The ultimate goal is what should drive every action at lower levels. If an activity doesn’t fit strongly within your goal hierarchy, then it likely isn’t moving you closer to your goal and maybe you should stop. For example, you might find that answering emails and hanging out on Facebook all day isn’t helping you make real progress on your project, which then isn’t driving you toward your goal.
When well constructed, a goal hierarchy promotes grit. If all your activities are in pursuit of your highest-level goal, then your everyday activities apply effort toward your goal.
I found myself with plenty of low-level goals that drove my progress weekly but they do not necessarily tie to the upper tiers and eventually, toward the end goal.
I was busy, but I was not productive or focused because I did not have progressive tasks, I was always performing low-level goals without having any end in sight.
To solve this, I established a proper goal hierarchy and had it such that all levels of goals are interlinked together, that with the completion of one goal led to another of a higher level, and ultimately toward my purpose.
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