You Want to Be Productive? All You Need is Purpose and a Process

There are moments in which we need to take a step back and focus on the critical stuff. To take the 30,000 ft. view and see the bigger picture so that we can adjust and redesign our life’s building blocks.

For the past few years, I have been experimenting with practices and habits to enhance my impact and productivity. Through that process, I have learned that two key principles, when successfully combined, have the power to keep a human being operating at a high rate.

The approach is simple. If we compare a productive life with the concept of travel, what are the key elements defining our movement?

1. Direction: setting ambitions as identity-based goals.
2. Fuel: adopting a daily routine that keeps us focused on action and drives us to our goal.

1. Direction: Setting Ambitions as Identity-Based Goals

Basic premise: the absence of meaning in what we do impairs our ability to perform at our best.

1. What person, at a personal and professional level, do you aim to become in the next few years? 
2. Are your daily actions contributing to becoming that person as you go along? How are you aligning intentionality with actions?

There is a big difference between deciding to “drop 5kg” vs. aiming to“become a stronger, leaner and healthier individual” and drop 5kg as a result. The first one is a self-exhausting goal, and it explains why most dieters regain their old weight once they hit their target: there is deeper aspiration underpining the goal itself. However, the other version represents a milestone that you conque as you work towards the person you want to become. This is the power of identity-based goals.

Note how different it feels to say “I want to write a book” as opposed to “I am a reliable writer who publishes one book per year”.

Identity definition forces a mindset shift, which in turn makes us adopt principles that become powerful behaviour drivers. “Writing a book” is no longer a goal, but a result of who we want to become. Goals alone aren’t behaviour drivers. As Simon Sinek notes, it is worth starting with “why” before defining “what” and “how”.

A sense of direction and deep intentionality are pre-requisites for action. And it is through action that we craft real meaning, not by achieving our results. It is the work we do, and the person we become trying to achieve those goals, that brings meaning to our lives.

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how" - Friedrich Nietzsche

2. Fuel: Adopting Daily Routines That Will Drive You to Your Goal

Basic premise: Willpower is not your friend; a good process is. Structure your day so that you are prompted to action by a simple process.

As a parent, I have seen how a child with no routines struggles to adapt to the basic needs of social life. We all need rely on processes to function. It is a premise of human nature.

A well defined set of processes, habits and routines become critical when trying to maximise our personal and professional output. Our mind does not cope well with grand objectives placed in the distant future, and lack of connection between what we want from the future and what we need to do today, combined with a reliance on willpower, leads to failure. 

New year resolutions are a great example of this. Research show that the initial push last only a few weeks, for they are set without the right combination of intrinsic motivation, ability and a supportive process.

Simplifying the present time and defining weekly actions can get us closer to such goals. This is why processes become key. We may think of this as the funnel that we need to build between now and our objectives.

”An object in motion continues in motion” — Isaac Newton

Step 1 — Define The "High-Impact Actions" That Are Best Predictors of Your Goal

These are the actions that, if sustained week after week, will help us get closer to the goal.

High-Impact Actions (HIA), also called “Process Goals” or “Lead Measures”, determine performance. They need to meet the following conditions:

1. They are 100% within your control. You either do them or you don't.
2. The threshold for action is low, they are "easy to start" activities.
3. They belong to a tactical timeline: quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily.
4. They can become habits, routines and processes to minimize your dependence on willpower and ensure consistency. They need to be habits that can included (and repeated) as part of a weekly schedule.

For instance, if you are writing a book, committing to writing 500 words per day is a good HIA. Maybe contacting 2-3 editors per month to pitch your idea is also worth doing. Can you block your calendar and commit to these habitual tasks x-times per the week?

If you are a business developer or consultant with sales targets, it is likely that achieving those targets will depend on how many clients you call or visit each month. In addition to that "lead measure" (visits), a good way to track how effective you are in those meetings may be to add a "lag measure" (results or KPIs) like "number of proposals submitted per month".

Pick a metric and identify the actions that have the best predictive value of the result, assuming that - as always - 80% of results will come from the 20% of actions (the Pareto principle applies to most things in life).

Step 2 — Set up a Process That Works For You

If you are like me, most fresh in the morning, you could work towards your ambitions through a solid morning routine. 

As soon as I wake up, I devote 45 minutes to journaling, meditation and daily planning. It allows me to download my thoughts and brainstorm about open issues, visualise my goals and start my day feeling empowered and in control.

When I hit my desk at work, at around 9am, I invest my prime morning hours into those actions that have the largest impact on my goals: strategy, business development and market intel. My afternoons, instead, go to low energy stuff like general admin (i.e. CRM housekeeping), setting priorities, catching up on notes, scheduling appointments, following up on email, etc.

Jack Dorsey, CEO of both Twitter and Square, goes even further. He asigns days to themes, like "admin Mondays", "investor Tuesdays", "marketing Wednesdays", etc. So anything "marketing" is reviewed and planned on Wednesdays, and only on that day of the week.

This is a smart way to minimise our "attention residue", which is the mental drag we suffer as we shift from one activity to another. Mind you, research has shown it can take up to 20 minutes to go back to full focus after being interrupted by a simple email. The value of holding deep single focus on one task or theme is one of today's most underrated features of work.

Step 3 — Forget About The Ultimate Goal. Focus on The Daily Actions And Trust The Process

As per Jordan Peterson's quote, if you focus on doing what needs to be done every day, you don't have to worry about the future. So stop worrying about that big goal of yours, and just focus on ticking the boxes on the High-Impact Activities you determined for your plan. Only consistent action will take you to your goals, whatever those are.

I keep my brain on execution mode (and not on goal contemplation mode) by translating my High-Impact Activities into a set of deliverables for the week. On Sundays I review my goals, I check the specific needs for the week, and I come up with 5 weekly critical deliverables that need to happen by the end of that week. I call these my W5's or Weekly-5's, key things that will get done by Friday evening. As you can imagine, my morning prime time is mostly devoted to pushing these W5's forward every day.

Conclusion: Putting it All Together

Productivity, to me, is a successful combination of 1) meaningful aspirations, 2) a predictive set of daily processes and 3) the execution of small actions consistently on a daily basis.

So back to you now. What is really important to you, and why? How much quality time are you devoting every week to push those key goals forward, on a scale of 0 to 10? How can you build weekly processes to gain consistency and take that rating to at least 7 out of 10?

Being productive is not getting more stuff done. To me, it implies doing more stuff that is consistent with the person we want to become, and getting it done in the most effective way possible.