I’ve haven written for ages for this blog.
I could say that I have a good excuse, but to be honest, I could’ve found some time to write something here as well. And I say here as well, because I haven’t been sitting on my hands all this time. I’ve been writing. Quite a lot lately. And I’ve changed jobs as well. True story.
But, let’s get to the point. How do you know you’re being productive?
I had this question on my mind for quite a while. First of all, what stands as being productive? My own definition of being productive, mostly taken from my experience in the corporate world, is doing the tasks you were given to do. Reaching the targets, going above them.
In our day to day lives, how do we measure that? For a business is easy. You have an amount of X tasks, that will add Y amount of value to the end product resulting in a Z profit. But in our day to day lives, it’s hard sometimes to quantify everything that we do and put a monetary value to it. Because sometimes the things that we do won’t bring us any money. How do you monetize the fact that you read a book? Many of the things that we do, will bring value in the future, but not today or tomorrow.
For a long time I had the feeling that I’m not being productive. Either I was playing games too much, or I was spending my time surfing the webs, I had the feelings that I wasn’t doing the things that I was supposed to do.
Last week I decided to change that. I’ve decided to keep track of what I was doing. I’ve made my schedule, I’ve written down all the goals for the week and went down to business.
Guess what? Last week was the most productive week that I had in weeks. I woke up in the morning feeling good. I did my tasks. And certainly, I haven’t done everything on my plate. But it felt good. And it created a burst of energy for this week as well. I can’t wait to see how this one will go.
The secret of feeling productive is not the amount of work that we put in, but how we measure it. If we keep track of our schedule and make a list with our task, we will have that rush of dopamine, that will make us happy and productive.