Productivity = Doing the maximum no. of to-dos in the shortest time.
Wrong. This is a seductive but nonsensical idea.
Every day, ideally, only one or two things should be your real priorities — these have to be done at any cost. E.g., my priority today is to record a few videos for a program I am creating for handling anxiety.
But there is a problem – if I just focus on my main task, very few other things will get done. And that’s perfectly ok.
Ideally, your top priority tasks should be so wildly important that if they get done, nothing else should matter much.
Of course, life is non-ideal and some days, you will a large number of lower order tasks lined up – that is fine too.
But if it is happening too often, then you have a bigger problem — you need more aspirational goals. Pick up some challenging project else life will get lost in the minutiae.
So what about the other pending stuff? Every day, a few tasks will rise to the top of the priority stack and get tackled — the rest will wait for their turn.
Don’t make productivity a race to just stay busy. That is not a race you want to win. Nor is it a race you want to enter.
– Rajan