Real Productivity Is In Feeling Good Here And Now

True productivity is not always in reaching a large number of daily goals.  Not if in each work achievement the quality of life, health, emotional satisfaction and psychological balance are lost.

We are a society that has always made us believe that “ the more you do, the more you are worth, the more you produce, the more status you acquire”. Maybe it’s time to rephrase that idea.

If we look up the word productivity in a dictionary, we can find definitions such as ‘ the amount of production that a person can generate in a certain amount of time and using a specific level of effort or energy’. This idea is easy to understand, however, in real life few words cause us so many headaches and pictures of anxiety.

You can get up at dawn to complete your workday and go to bed in the wee hours of the morning after having completed hundreds of tasks. However, even so, you may have the feeling that that day was not productive at all. The reason? Often, not having complied with what we had mentally proposed causes us to suffer.

Productivity is not about math, it is not about making 100 sales, getting 5 new customers, or packing 200 boxes per hour. Actually, this term belongs more to the field of emotions and subjectivity. You are really productive when you feel good about what you achieve each day; be it a lot or a little.

True productivity comes with personal satisfaction

In Lewis Carroll’s book Alice Through the Looking Glass we find a most metaphorical passage. It is the one in which the inhabitants of the country of the Red Queen are forced to run very fast just to stay in the same point. Thus, those who wanted to advance in order to reach a specific place, had to run faster than others.

This image established what is known as the Red Queen hypothesis that allows us to understand that to survive in a given scenario, we must invest more resources and energy than the rest to be efficient and thus guarantee our success or progress.

Something similar happens on the productivity issue. It is not enough to do the same as those around us, we must produce more, faster and with higher quality. Only in this way is a company positioned in the market and only in this way, does the worker prove his worth. Therefore, it is not enough to be busy, you have to be “very busy” to give an image of absolute efficiency.

We internalized this idea very early and led us to believe that the more hours we put into that job, that occupation, objective or task, the more valuable we were and the better image we had of ourselves. However, sooner or later we discovered it: being always busy does not bring happiness, but rather inoculates us with dissatisfaction and suffering in many cases.

The real productivity is not in how many things you do but in how you feel

True productivity for a writer is not measured in the number of pages written in a day. Rather, it is about how satisfied you feel with what you have written, be it 20 pages or 5.

Companies should not measure their productivity in the number of hours worked either. Sometimes you don’t have to spend 10 hours in an office to achieve your goals, sometimes half is enough.

Work psychology knows that for human capital to be productive, it must be satisfied. Motivation, a good work environment, camaraderie, satisfaction and employee appreciation manage to bring out the best in the person and significantly improve final productivity.

Emotions are those psychic tendons that drive not only a job well done but also the desire to improve ourselves, to achieve greater goals.

Sometimes doing nothing is also being productive

Sometimes there come moments in our lives when we are forced to stop, to slow down. However, we find ourselves so used to filling our time with tasks, goals to achieve and schedules to meet, that putting our lives on pause is a challenge and even a problem.

It is because we have been led to believe that being busy is synonymous with productivity. They have convinced us that time is money and we must make the most of it by doing things (whatever they are) for at least 25 hours a day. Suddenly, when our reality enters a state of calm, when nothing is asked of us other than being and being, there is something that seems to be wrong with us. We are not being productive!

And yet we can be. Because sometimes doing nothing is the best thing you can give yourself. Rest, lead a more leisurely, curious, contemplative life and the color of calm is therapeutic.

Giving ourselves what we deserve when we need it, even if it’s hard to believe, is true productivity in certain times. All of this can revert to our physical and mental well-being. Let’s keep it in mind.