The key to long term productivity is to find the action that you would, and could, repeat
forever.
And there are four key terms in this sentence: find the action, would, could, and forever.
Find the action is important because if you already knew what action to do, you would
already be productive.
There is a productive action out there, but it has to be discovered, and this requires
the willingness and the commitment on your part to find it.
The term ‘would’ is important because you actually have to want to do the action.
It makes you consider whether (A) you actually enjoy the action itself, and (B) whether you’re
willing to prioritize it.
The term ‘could’ is important because it makes you consider whether the action is
actually possible for you to do.
Are you physically capable of doing it?
Do you have the right tools & resources?
Do you have enough energy to do it each day?
And lastly, the term ‘forever’ is a stress test.
It ensures the action is repeatable for, and compatible with, the rest of your life.
Now let’s look at the lives of four different people, all of whom want to become poets,
and let’s see whether or not they satisfy the four conditions of long-term productivity.
Brock says he wants to be a poet, but he believes that it’s something he can never do.
He believes that it requires time, money, or talent, things which he believes he doesn’t
have.
So Brock’s doesn’t even pass the first stage of finding an action.
He’s not willing to find an action that’ll get him to his goal, and so he’ll never
get there.
Katie also wants to be a poet.
She imagines how awesome it would be to be famous for her works, make money, and spend
her time writing.
So Katie is determined to find the action that will allow her to accomplish her goal.
The obvious action is to write a bit of poetry each day.
The thing is, Katie hates the actual work of writing poetry.
It’s tedious, boring, and not worth the effort.
Katie is in love with the idea of being a poet, the thing she’s conjured in her imagination,
but she’s not in love with the reality that is actually required to get there.
So Katie fails in the second stage: she’s found the action, but it’s not actually
something she would do.
So she’ll never accomplish her goal.
Now Virginia, on the other hand, has decided that it’s important to write poetry every
day, and she actually enjoys the act of writing poetry.
Vanessa’s problem is that she also works a day job that she loves as an interior designer,
and she is the mother of two young kids.
So she’s very busy.
While she wants to become a poet and write poetry every day, it’s not something she
wants to do more than the other activities of her life.
So Virginia also falls off at the ‘would’ stage.
She found an activity she would do, but it’s not really one she would do over others: it’s
not really a priority.
Poetry will most likely remain a hobby for her, and she may or may not inch closer towards
her goal.
And lastly, there’s Elliot.
Elliot writes daily, he enjoys the act of writing, and he actually wants to do it more
than most other activities in his life.
He wants to make a living out of it.
So he found an action that he would do.
But is it one he could do?
Elliot is quite busy.
He works as a nurse during the day, and he’s quite tired when he comes home.
He has a limited amount of energy that he can spend on other activities.
Elliot decides, in the beginning, that he could do about 3 hours of writing every evening.
And he keeps this up for about a week, but he eventually falls off the wagon.
Why?
This brings us to the final component.
Elliot has found an action that he would do, and that he could do, but he hasn’t found
a variation of the action that he could do forever.
So he shrinks his writing down 2 minutes a day to start.
And he finds that he can sustain this forever.
Now he’s moving towards his goal of becoming a poet, and this is completely sustainable.
Then he works up to 10 minutes a day and finds it’s still sustainable.
Then he goes up to 30 minutes, and then finally, he finds that an hour is the maximum amount
he can do each day after work and maintain forever, regardless of the other conditions
in his life.
And so I’ll leave you with this.
The key to long-term productivity is consistency.
And the key to consistency is to find the action that you would, and could, repeat forever.
And each of the four stages is important.
Have you found the action?
Are you open and willing to search for it?
Would you actually do the action?
Do you enjoy the process, and is it something you enjoy more than other things?
Is it a priority for you?
Could you actually do the action?
Do you have the knowledge, the capacity, the tools, and the energy to do it?
And lastly, have you shrunk the action down so that you could repeat it forever?
Have you made it manageable?
Productivity is like movement, and if you pass all four stages, you’ve successfully
created a step that you can take each day, and if you take a step towards your goal each
day, you’ll inevitably reach it.
If you’re interested in learning ‘how to 10x your productivity’ check out my video
on the topic by clicking the card in the top right of your screen
or the link in the description.