The Death of Productivity

Steve Pavlina shows how to make a distinction between the important tasks and the urgent tasks on your to-do list. Examples of important items on your list could be learning new skills, finding a new relationship (or working on the one you have), or starting a new project. Note that these items are for you, not for someone waiting for a response to your e-mail. Steve calls this paying yourself first. (Yahoo Finance)

On Yahoo this morning there was a section about how to improve your productivity and in there were six tips that you can use. One of those tips, above, is Do important tasks instead of urgent ones. While I am all for doing the important things, the reality of the modern business world just is not that way. There is nothing so important that it cannot be displaced by something more urgent. And it is usually urgent because someone else dropped the ball and now things are in peril.

And I say this, both as a cynic and as someone with fifteen years of watching it happen. We would all agree that improving our own skills or starting a new project (and seeing through to fruition) is a good thing, but most of us, particularly those in IT are interrupt driven any more. It is almost impossible to carve out a solid fifteen minutes of uninterrupted time to eat, much less the hour or so needed to properly plan a new project or research a new topic. In the modern world, that falls under the heading of other duties which, sadly, tends to translate to on your own time. Even training, which every company I have worked for pays lip service to (we will pay for a week of training), comes with caveats and oh by the ways. (The training is on your own time, so while the company will cover the cost, you loose vacation, or the old chestnut of "we had to cut the training budget this year" or my personal favorite "you cannot go to training for a week, you are needed here.") And then, even if you get to go, you spend more time checking your electronic leash for what is going on back in the office.

The tips for improving productivity are interesting, if only to show how much we have lost in terms of control over our lives to this thing we call work.