Part of the idea behind this community is to share thoughts and ideas about the things we do. Today I would like to share my own personal thoughts on my Productivity (yes, with a capital P) practice. Not the nuts-and-bolts of how it works, that is what you can find at my own blog, rather I’d like to share and discuss the “why” and the “what’s in it for me”.

My own personal approach to achieving a productive workflow practice is not to find a way to force my nose down to the grindstone and crank, crank, crank my way through a never-ending list of tasks and obligations. Nor is it my desire to create a series of lists and sub-lists that I can scan for something to work on based upon the time of day and where I happen to be sitting, like some sort of choose your own adventure story.

Rather, my goal is to be able to manage and maintain a capture & filter system that allows me to quickly sort & identify the urgent and the important tasks that will require my full attention. “Cranking Widgets” is no longer the source of any personal satisfaction for me. Instead, I have chosen to lovingly hand-craft the widgets that I choose to make.

Is Everything Work?

In the introduction to his latest book, “Making It All Work“, David Allen writes:

“…any number of techniques and tools are available to help us get organized, manage our time, and be more efficient. What’s missing is a fundamental understanding of, and effective model for, the dynamics of the process as a whole – a way to make it all work.”

The first time that I read this I took it to mean that there is some sort of global system of processes that can me wrapped around every aspect of our lives, not only our work but our home and families as well. The more I thought about this idea, the more it bothered me. This concept, in my own personal opinion, goes against much of what the founders of this very forum wrangled with as we were creating it.

“What is the point?” we asked ourselves and each other, “Why are we doing this?” Part of the answer was “to create a community where people can share ideas”, and another part of the answer had to do with applying creativity to our work and to our lives so that both could be full and rewarding. To be able to avoid having our work encroach on our lives.

It’s About Being Done

As you can see in the tagline at the top of this page, we believe that Life is not about making everything into Work – to be managed and processed, instead we believe that we should be using our powers of creativity and innovation to enhance our life and our work. These two realms may have some overlap but they are distinctly different.

They require different approaches. As anyone who has ever tried to manage a spouse or child as if they were an employee can tell you, using the same approach to both is a difficult proposition.

Getting my Work done, as efficiently and effectively as possible, allows me to close the office door and go into the living room and start on my Life. I practice my productivity principles while I am working so that I can stop working. So that I can live my life without worrying about work.

It’s about being done.

Share your thoughts in the forum [link].