Effective Productivity

Effectivity - Are you just Getting Things Done or are you Getting The Right Things Done?

Two years ago, when I owned a building company in Australia, one of my teams needed some sound insulation batts to fit into the walls of the house they were building.  Someone had to take a trip 40 kilometres down the coast to buy them and it had to be done straight away.  So the foreman asked one of the labourers to take a truck to pick up a load of “Sound Batts” and get them on site before the team ran out of work.  He enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity to do such a critical job and in world record time, he proudly returned with a load of “Sand Bags”.   He thought he had done what was required but there was a communication breakdown and it had all gone wrong.

 When I heard the story, I couldn’t be cross.  Sure the team wasted time and money, and we had became the owners of a load of sand bags that we had no use for, but nobody could say that this enthusiastic employee didn’t get things done.  The only problem was that he was doing the wrong things.  Was he productive? Yes.  Was he effective? No.

Getting Things Done is a concept that has become very popular recently due to the work of David Allen.  However, I believe that there are a lot of people who still fail to make the distinction between Getting Things Done (GTD) and what I will call, Getting The Right Things Done (GTRTD).  We can’t blame David Allen for this, it is actually our fault if we don’t know which are the right things to do in the first place.

If GTD leads to productivity, then GTRTD leads to effective productivity.  I will use the term Effectivity a bit more than productivity, around this site to remind us that productivity is useless unless it is effective in producing outcomes that take us closer to our goals.  Effectivity seems to be a much more meaningful term if we are truly seeking high performance.

There is one obvious but overlooked way to work out if you are GTRTD or just GTD.  We have to compare the things that we are doing with what will achieve our goals.  We have to develop a reliable way to decide ”Will getting this done, now, be effective in progressing me towards my goals?”.

One way to decide in advance what things to get done, is to fill our lives with effective action steps.  An effective action step is simply the result of carefully planned goals.  The short version of the process goes like this:

1. Decide what you want to achieve with your life.
2. Decide how you will go about achieving it
3. Compose this achievement into a motivating live goal
4. Break the goal down into as many definite steps as you will need.
5. These steps are your action steps, so do them.

It is these action steps that are the keys to achieving your goals.  If you have accurately formulated these steps, completing each of them in turn will inevitably lead you to your desired goal.  I will write more about effective goal setting in another article, but for now, just remember that effectivity comes from precisely carrying out your action steps, not just getting things done.

This is all very well for a perfect world, but what if other things still have to be done?  Who is going to take out the rubbish if it doesn’t appear on you priorities as an action step?  Of course there will be things to do that don’t directly work you towards your goals, but my point is that we must radically reduce these things.   

Very soon, I will finish writing for this morning, and go to the kitchen to make breakfast for my family.  This doesn’t feature directly in me achieving my goals, but it is simply something important that has to be done.  The best that I can do is use every tool that I have available to do things, like this, as efficiently as possible.  This will involve, streamlining the process, bulking tasks together, focusing on one task at a time and delegating or even employing others to get these things done.  Leo at Zen Habits is doing an excellent job of writing about putting the GTD concepts into action, head over there and read what he has to say. 

So remember that before you can get the right things done, you have to know which actions will contribute to achieving your goals.  So plan before you act and it will be clear what things need to get done.  Your life should be filled with clearly defined action steps.  Completing these action steps is the most effective way that you can progress to your goals.  These are the things that you should focus on getting done.

So consider today, where are you productively getting the wrong things done?

What do you have to do to raise your effectivity in these areas?