“Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.” — Franz Kafka
The key to being more productive every day starts with your WHY.
You need a WHY that inspires you.
You need a compelling vision with clarity in your mind’s eye that lights your heart on fire and pulls you forward.
You need to see the changes in your mind that are worth fighting for, worth making time for, and worth spending your precious life force on.
Keep Your Best Kindling Close to Your Heart
Whether that’s change your body, improve your mind, change your health, change your wealth, improve your performance at work, etc, you need your WHY front and center.
Keep your best kindling near and dear to you heart so that you can pull yourself through your roughest days and toughest moments.
Keep your kindling close so that when you feel your fire burning low, or when you feel knocked down or defeated, you can fan your flames and rise again.
Your compelling WHY will help you leap over hurdles, conquer your procrastination, and trim bad habits down to size.
That’s the art of how to start.
But, as part of your transition to becoming a more productive person, you need to do a few key things to pull this off for real and make it a lasting thing.
Picture a More Productive You in Your Mind’s Eye
You need to see yourself as a productive person.
You need to ask yourself who do you need to become to be a person who is productive.
Your identity, who you see yourself to be, sets the stage for the scripts you will run, and the acts you will play, in your daily stage of life.
You will catch yourself in those moments of bad decisions, and your identity will lift and inspire you to better decisions. You will ask yourself things like, “What would more productive me, do, in this situation?”
We do more to be consistent with our self-image than to simply go through the motions of our day.
In your quest to be true, to more productive you, you will find yourself trading lesser habits for better ones.
You will challenge yourself around the choices you have made, unconsciously or consciously, around how you eat, sleep, and move—like how a productive person would.
Build Better Habits, then Your Better Habits Build a Better You
As you rise to this calling of your higher self, you will anchor new habits that support your self image. You will catch yourself in moments of crises but you won’t fall, and you won’t fail, because your habits will carry you forward.
Sure, you will have setbacks and missteps, but you will gradually surround yourself with your system of habits that will see you through the best of times and the worst of times.
After all, in your heart and in your mind’s eye, you are a productive person now.
And along with that persona comes an attitude of positivity with eyes forward that turns problems into challenges, failures into lessons, and life’s lemons into lemon meringue pie.
Develop Deep Self-Awareness So You Can Change in the Right Direction
And as enjoy this journey of trials and tribulations, you will develop deep self-awareness.
You will learn what you value for real. Not what you are supposed to value or what other people think you should value.
You will learn your strengths and your weaknesses. You will learn how to adapt so that you spend more time in your strengths, and less time in your weaknesses.
Give Your Best Where You Have Your Best to Give in the Service of Others
You will learn how to give your best where you have your best to give, in the service of others.
And this selfish, selfless system will empower you to summon better energy, better purpose, and better clarity, and relentless courage, that combined will foster and fuel an unstoppable you.
But the real beauty of this path of meaningful results is that you will be touching lives and making your unique dent in the universe.
Whether you are turning chores into chances, finding your flow, or changing the world, or your world, in magnificent ways, you will be blazing a trail, leaving a legacy, and lifting the way forward while living, leading, and being, your more productive self.
If All Else Fails…
And if that doesn’t work, spend the first two hours each day getting the things done, that you never get done.
And if you don’t have that time, then split the difference. Go to bed an hour earlier, so you can wake up an hour earlier and use your new found hour in the morning to at least hack away at a more productive you.
Sometimes, a few, small, well-placed moves can shift your world in a way that moves your inner mountains in a big way.
Enjoy your view from the mountain top.
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