Driving home from the bank this morning, I was thinking that “improving my productivity” really meant doing more meaningful things. I think meaningful is the critical word, because it implies that:

1. You know what actually is important to you, and
2. You know what you need to create—change, action, or tangible goods—to support #1.

An assumption I have carried is that being more productive also meant spending proportionally more time on those important things. I went freelance because I figured I could devote larger swaths of time to whatever important things popped up, and so I did. However, I didn’t feel more productive because I didn’t know what was important to me, and I had a warped sense of time.

One realization that I’ve gained from my “wake up early” experiments is that once you regularize a schedule, the amount of time you have is much clearer. The boundaries of time units, from the time you wake up to the times you eat, are synchronized with the rise and fall of both the sun and one’s energy levels. From this I see that I actually don’t have as much time as I thought to convert to “purely meaningful and important” productive work. At most, I probably have only about 1/3rd of my waking day available for that productive work; the rest of the time is taken up with eating, social interaction, adminstrative overhead, and various work- and home-related chores. These are not particularly meaningful tasks in the grand scheme of my planning, but there’s no way to ignore them unless I throw money at the problem. Since I don’t have that kind of money, I’m stuck until I make some more. That’s about as far as I got in my thinking.

My GHD Resolutions, it occurs to me, embody implications #1 and #2 above, so all I really need to do is act on them. However, the other kind of productivity implies that I am focused on business development, and now we’re starting to bump up against my finite amount of time to get both things done.

I’ve thought in the past that productivity was a kind of dramatic burst of energy, all-consuming in its passion. I’m starting to think that it’s actually more like collecting aluminium cans for the 5cent deposit return, or that you can’t see productivity if you’re looking right at it all the time. It’s like the saying, “a watched pot never boils.” Productivity is, perhaps most reliably, the commitment to small steps that you know are related to those meaningful things and people in your life. This is a rather novel perspective for me to consider, and I wouldn’t even be considering it if I hadn’t had those recent thoughts on [methodical versus impulsive creativity][methodical], the scientific creative process and the experience a regular early-morning schedule. I’m not sure I like the implications of limited time resources and small steps—I tend to be impatient with limits, and look for ways around them—but I should try working within these constraints this week and see what happens.