Not Everything Should Be Efficient
I just recently listened to Deep Questions with Cal Newport. He had a guest on, the planning expert Sarah Hart-Unger. She said something that made me think and also really resonated with me. What if planning and productivity are different things? She differentiated between them, something I have never considered, but it made a lot of sense. Productivity is about doing more. Planning is about finding time for the things you want. Those two things are different, and they probably should be separated, or at least you need to think differently about them. My mindset is different when I am thinking about productivity compared to when I am planning my day to find time to do something I am really excited about.
The whole idea of mindful productivity comes from this idea of productivity and planning being different things. I have tried to combine them and called it mindful productivity. The whole philosophy I have around productivity is that the goal needs to be spending time doing the things you want. I am efficient at work because I want to have more time outside of work doing the things I love. Not that I hate my job,I actually enjoy it. But you kind of get the point. Often we are not trying to be efficient when we are drawing, painting, watching a movie, or playing video games. We are doing it out of pure pleasure.
With that being said, I feel like we lately have been trying to make that efficient too. The point is no longer to enjoy a book you are reading, but to read 50 or 100 books. Not that it is wrong to read a lot of books, but I wish we could focus more on enjoying the process instead of chasing goals and always doing more. That is where I believe in this idea of mindful productivity. Being efficient so that you have the time to spend enjoying and being present with the things you love. Let me try to give you an example of where productivity comes in here. I write down everything even on vacations, if I remember something I should do at work, I just quickly write it down. I write it down so I can let it go. If not, I try to remember it when I am on vacation and I get all stressed out and just end up doing it on vacation. When I write it down in my notebook, in my to-do list app, or elsewhere, I know that I have set up systems to make sure that it appears when and where I need it to. So I can let it go. This is not something that suddenly happened. I needed to spend a lot of time learning about myself and force myself to let things go. I am not into productivity just because I find notebooks, fountain pens, and apps fun. I am into productivity because it is vital for my mental health. Every time I feel like my system breaks, I spiral, and it makes sense, because I also struggle with bipolar disorder, but that has been one of the main reasons why I am into productivity apps.
Planning and productivity being two different things is sort of the same as the way I am thinking about productivity. I think dividing them is something I should consider going forward. Not just for planning, but also for things like note-taking. Because sometimes I take notes for efficiency. I know that in the near future I will have to do something with those notes, whether it is a project or something else. The point is that the note is getting used for something soon. Other times I take notes to think, to work through things like a book I am reading. I don’t want to use them for something specific right now, but I am trying to understand a book I read just for enjoyment. There is no pressure; it is just for fun. I do that type of note-taking a lot, connecting ideas with my own thoughts and trying to understand things better. I can do something with those notes, but that is not the goal. The goal is just to deepen my understanding of something I find exciting. It is not important, I don’t have to do it, but I am doing it because I want to. Those notes are different from my meeting notes or work notes. With work notes, I don’t want to spend a lot of time on them. I want to figure out where to use them and what is important. I might even decide to outsource those notes to someone or something (AI) else. They are different and should be treated differently.
I am a big fan of the idea of differentiating planning and productivity, and I feel like this can also apply to other things in productivity, like note-taking. I like differentiating between those things simply because I like to differentiate between the times I should be efficient and the times I should be mindful. That is why this idea I came across on Cal Newport’s podcast resonated with me as much as it did. I feel like I have been chasing efficiency for so long. The goal of being productive has been just doing more, and in some places getting more done is important, but I am fighting to try to avoid living my whole life like that. So the words we use are not important. The important thing for me is to differentiate, so I can live a slower life and so everything in my life is not all about efficiency. That is why I love differentiating between productivity and planning, and it will be an idea I will continue to play around with going forward.