Actually Working
I have written about this before, but I feel like it is an important thought in my head.
We live in a “busy” culture. Everyone is always “busy,” or so they say.
When you catch up with someone that you have not seen in a long time, they always enter the conversation with “Yeah, I’ve been super busy.” It is a competition to be the busiest person in the world! Right?
Rarely do we “look up to people” who do not work at all. Rarely do we admire the people who relax all day, meditate, watch Netflix, etc.
Our society admires doers. But let’s not confuse that with talkers. Being busy is very different from getting shit done.
You do not have to work ALL DAY to be productive. You do not have to actually work that many hours to be super productive.
In fact, the best workers are able to do things 10x better and faster than their peers — meaning they could get the same amount of things done, in one tenth of the time, and still have time to watch Netflix or go play basketball.
Is that a bad thing?
Of course not.
It has made me think…when you say you are working..how much are you actually working?
If we always gave it our all, our 100%, when we were working, how much time could we save during the day?
Not on Twitter. Not in boring meetings. Not checking our phones, or snapchats. Just working. Just focusing on the task at hand.
I think you should really enjoy your work. It should challenge you. It should be hard. It should help you grow — or whatever your goal is with working. But I think that you can accomplish all of those things, in a much shorter amount of time, if, when you worked, you just worked.
You focused. You killed it. And you got back to whatever else you wanted to do.
Now perhaps the most productive people are the people who can sustain that level of work for a super long period of time.
One of the hardest things about trying to do that, and something I am struggling with often, is evading distractions and temptations.
We all suffer from some sort of FOMO (fear of missing out). Right now, I have 3 slack notifications. Do I check them? Probably. Should I? Probably not.
The “always-on” culture has made it much harder to focus. And, to this day, I think focus + consistency are the two most powerful traits.
Learn to focus on what matters and you’ll never lose sight of your goals. You’ll stop spending time on stupid shit — like instagram followers and messages — and you’ll miraculously get WAY more done.
PS — stop telling people how busy you are. SHOW not tell.
Originally published at Jordan Gonen.
By jordangonen on March 26, 2017.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.