Before we jump into the blog post, I want to quickly let you know that I’ll be offering a monthlong course called all about clarifying your goals and achieving them through intentional productivity sessions. You can learn more about the course here. Thanks for your time, and enjoy the blog post!
Productivity looks different for us all.
Maybe you’re a morning person, getting into a state of flow and checking off your top three to-do list boxes before your family wakes up. Maybe you focus the best when you’re on a co-working call with a friend, knowing that you’ll need to report back at the end of the hour and share what you accomplished. Maybe you live with a health issue that makes it difficult for you to look at screens for more than a couple hours a day, so you need to schedule your time on your laptop. There are many different approaches to being productive, and I wanted to use today’s post to talk about why I think it’s so important to personalize your approach to your productivity sessions. I’ll cover this topic in greater detail in my 4-week online course Perceptible Progress, which runs September 1-30, 2022.
Personal Resources Fuel Your Actions
Personal resources are what enables us to check tasks off our to-do list. The most often discussed resources are time, energy, and focus, which productivity researchers have translated into tools and approaches like the Pomodoro Method, the Must-Do Method, and Deep Work.
It’s important to acknowledge that our personal resources shift every day. In fact, they shift hour to hour, project to project, and task to task. When we expand our conception of personal resources from time/energy/focus to include other things that influence our ability to complete tasks, like our physical health, our mental health, our skillsets, and our interest levels, then we can imagine how our experience with our productivity practices will shift all the time! This is one reason why it’s important to personalize your approach to being productive: so you can make forward progress while acknowledging what feels possible for you during each productivity session.
Don’t force yourself to use a tool that you don’t like.
I spent two years actively researching and trying out different productivity tools each week and I have to admit that I only kept a handful of those in my active repertoire. Many of the time management, focus, and habit formation tools I practiced for my weekly blog posts were helpful in the moment and they taught me a lot about what approaches to being productive fit me best. I even ended up developing my own approaches, like The Actionable and Achievable Goals System and The Goldilocks Approach to Productivity. When you personalize your approach to productivity, you take what work for you from productivity tools and approaches and adjust it to fit your own needs and interests, which means you’ll find more success than you would if you tried to force yourself into the same approach that works best for other people with different lives, values, and goals.
If you want to learn more about developing your personal productivity process, check out my course Perceptible Progress: A Goals Course, which is running from September 1 through September 30, 2022! You can learn more about the course and sign up below.
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