Defining productivity

According to the Oxford Dictionary, productivity is “the rate at which a person, company, or country does useful work”.

Given the amount of ‘busywork’ in which most people engage, I’d argue the word “useful” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The irony is that many people who seek to optimise their productivity instead unwittingly maximise the amount of work they do.

I think the goal of productivity should be to take positive action aligned with your long-term goals on a daily basis.

Humans are constantly disappointed by what we can achieve in a day, and amazed by what we can achieve in a year. If you can take even a single positive action aligned with your long-term goals each day, your progress over a year will be astounding.

(PS - don’t treat your email inbox as a to-do list. That might well be the opposite of productivity).

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P.S. - On April the 9th, I’m hosting a webcast about the fundamentals of marketing yourself on LinkedIn. If you’re a solo pro, LinkedIn is often the ideal place to create an online presence, and in this session we’ll step through some useful ways to think about how to use the platform to your advantage. It’s happening at 12pm, Tuesday the 9th of April (AEST). Register here.