Stress-free productivity does exist

In 1953 a group of students from Yale University was surveyed about many questions, included the following: Have you set goals? Have you written them down? Do you have a plan to accomplish them? 84% of the students had no defined goal, 13% had set goals but had not written them down, and 3% had written their goals down and also had a plan of action.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor known worldwide as a researcher on positive psychology, defined the concept of flow as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

Surely you know that the book written by David Allen in 2001, Getting Things Done, has become the manual of personal productivity for hundreds of thousands of followers. The great success of this method is that it has been used and validated empirically by a crowd of supporters.

Once you’ve captured everything that haunts you, the second stage of GTD is to clarify or process all that stuff, that is, to define exactly what each thing is and what the next step to achieve the end result is, if any.

Are you being productive or just active? They’re not the same thing, but we often use—unconsciously—the concept of activity to deceive ourselves (or consciously, to fool our boss). Sometimes we need to feel busy to not have to do other important tasks that make us uncomfortable for any reason. “I keep doing things all day. So cool!”. No doubt you’re working hard; you show dedication, but dedication sometimes masks a meaningless work. Are you inventing things to avoid doing what’s important? Think carefully about it and be honest with yourself.