Busy Versus Productive (Fruitful).
So, let’s get on to our series on Time Management.
I once heard the statement, “If you are too ‘busy’, then you’re doing too much”.
But wait a minute, should we actually be busy or productive, aka fruitful? Have you been busy, or have you been productive? Hmm… Is there a difference between the two words?
For the sake of this conversation, being busy means being occupied, yeah, literally busy doing something. A roller coaster is busy, right? It just moves round and round and round. You are not just lazing around, sleeping and lying down all day – you are engaging in activities.
On the other hand, being productive – fruitful implies that there’s fruit – an outcome of being ‘busy’. Did your time being busy yield any results? Or like the roller coaster, did your To-Do list only move around – nothing actually checked off the list.
At the end of the day, are you able to pinpoint what you achieved for the day? Are you able to account for the 24 hours that just passed? Are you just busy, or are you also fruitful?
Not to worry, that is what this Time Management Series will be about – how to move you from just being busy to being productive.
Just one tip for this post – Planning.
Proverbs 21:5 – Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity, but hasty shortcuts lead to poverty. (NLT)
That Bible verse says it all, most times, we jump into the day so hastily, yet we expect a productive day. What about spending some time to sharpen the axe, before attempting to cut down the tree?
Planning helps – Don’t just jump into things, rather, plan them. Give a purpose to every piece of time. Plan out the entire day. Don’t leave anything or portion of time to chance. If you don’t have something to do, others will give you what to do.
So what are you planning to do by the next hour from now – are you thinking of that right now? Are you shuffling your memory to remember the other deliverables you need for the day?
Get a piece of paper, notebook, digital planner – and write down something for every single hour of the day – that’s how to start.
Seems like we’re moving from bottom-up, but yes, the secret is to just start and then refine. Over the next posts, I will discuss some guidelines to planning, some tips and tools. I have tried different tools, but one that is currently suited for me right now is Google Tasks – I am able to use it for both my personal and domestic tasks and my office tasks. We’ll talk more about that in subsequent posts.
For now your action point should be this – write down what you plan to do in every hour of each day. See you in the next post!