What was your best productivity tip? That’s an extremely good question for everything that I’ve researched in motivation and productivity. One that just might be is about thinking about the stuff you don’t do.

We’re all trying to dodge thing that we’re doing vs thing we want to do but shouldn’t. This really is the age of distractions. So let’s look at thing you shouldn’t be doing as a list.

I don’t look a news websites

I don’t look at emails until I’ve worked an hour on a project.

I don’t look at my phone every 15 minutes.

I don’t sleep for more than 8 hours.

I don’t use social media more than twice a day.

I don’t listen to distracting music.

I don’t respond to every email immediately.

I stop working at 5pm.

I don’t eat at my desk.

Now compare this to a list that you would do.

I need to make my to do list the night before.

I should meet a new person every day.

Do something different each day.

Do a meditation session before working out.

Now this may not be possible for everyone like you can’t avoid meetings at 7 am or maybe just not into meditation.

I absolutely like to believe people about their reasons, but I will also question what they could do instead or sacrifice something to make it happen.

There’s surprisingly a lot of things that people can cut back on that they feel they should but really can’t. That is the definition of addiction and I’ve been there. I’ve played way too many video games during 2007-2008 that couldn’t tell you what was happening in the world beyond mindless entertainment during that time period.

So a hard truth about productivity is finding that works for you. There is no silver bullet ‘do this and you’ll instantly achieve everything you wanted to do today.” It comes from your knowledge of understanding yourself and working with your strengths vs avoiding your weakness.

When you’re creating the things you need to do, focus on what the big picture is. What you’re trying to achieve at the end of the day, month, or year. It helps to have meaning to what you do and not just get sucked in to the little busy work and wonder if it will all matter in the end. If you’re wondering, then you need to go back to the initial reason of starting.