My personal productivity story

Here’s my typ­i­cal day a year ago.

Wake up think­ing, “Today will be dif­fer­ent! Today I’ll do my best work.” Open my Gmail, start answer­ing some creepy com­mer­cial offers, oh, Anna’s call­ing, what’s up, Anna? Aha, you don’t know how to cancel an order? OK, I’ll help you… A few hours later I real­ize I still haven’t started on any­thing that matters. But now I need to answer these two emails that sit in my “To Do” folder and became really urgent a week ago…

This is an intro to my series on per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity for small busi­ness owners. Read on.

The day is over. I’m tired. What have I done? A few hours answer­ing, but mostly archiv­ing, email, lots of back-and-forth calls and chats with my team and part­ners, fixed another Google spread­sheet that didn’t work, helped with a “hard” customer. Is that all???

You would think I wasn’t very effi­cient in those days. So did I. But wait: I had been making to-do lists for a couple of years, had become a Gmail ninja with all those short­cuts and canned responses, had read GTD before it was cool. And still. What was wrong with me?

Digging down to the roots

I’m think­ing back to the time I started my business. I try to trace the roots back to the first day I started living this way. Without my own goals and plans. Constantly inter­rupted by my staff, my par­ents (with whom I was work­ing) and sales­peo­ple, by their demands and requests via cell phone, email and var­i­ous chat apps.

I get the impres­sion that I never lived the way I really wanted. I never had a goal I was work­ing towards. Well, I did have goals, I even posted them on the walls, wrote New Year’s res­o­lu­tions, etc. But did I actu­ally work towards them? Sometimes. More often not.

Despite the enor­mous number of self-help and time-management books, inspir­ing videos and blog posts I had con­sumed since I was around 17, I wasn’t making any progress.

Maybe we all start this way. Maybe it’s a feel­ing of self-importance that makes us so depen­dent on others. “If they call me, they need me” → “If they need me, I’m useful, I’m doing my work.” I sup­pose this is the uncon­scious line of thought that drives a life into the hell of servi­tude I found myself in.

OK, this is not the only reason. There are many more. Unfortunately, we were not taught to do the things we do now. We were raised to work at an old-school steel cast­ing plant. At least, this is how I feel about our edu­ca­tional system. We were not taught to build the life we want by con­scious effort; we were not told to fight for our goals and pro­tect our sanity from instant messengers. Our brains really need a soft­ware upgrade. Well, you’ve prob­a­bly heard all this stuff already.

Any ideas?

As always, there’s no simple solution. But there are a few things to start with. The most pow­er­ful one is to change the way you com­mu­ni­cate with the world, and espe­cially with your team. Some kind of par­a­digm shift has to happen. For me, it came after read­ing Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs.

Yes, it sounds ridicu­lous, saying you’ve changed your life after read­ing some pop­u­lar self-help book. But it seems to work for me. So I thought I had to share it. Maybe it could be useful for you too. I’ll explain it in more detail in the next posts. For now, you can read about my “silent mode” policy.