How to Tell If You Had a Productive Day
How do you know if you’ve had a productive day or not?
There are usually two kinds of answers to this question.
Input-based. You know you had a productive day based on the number of hours or amount of effort you put in.
Output-based. You know you had a productive day based on how much progress you made, how many things you sent out, etc.
I think both of those answers are wrong.
I don’t think you create value. You ARE value.
Your value is already inherent within you because your value is your brain.
Your value is all your past experiences, not only in work, but everything you’ve read, everything you’ve listened to, and all the experiences you’ve had in your life.
Your value is the unique way that your brain fires when you look at something. It’s the insights and reactions you’re constantly having to the things around you.
It’s the question that you ask in a meeting that you got invited to with no context, but you still had a thought that you wanted to express.
It’s the plan that you make or the outline that you sketch out — WAY before you put pen to paper or have the meeting — WAY before any output is created.
It's that first little seed of, “Hey, maybe we should do this.”
Your value is already in you, and you cannot turn that thing off.
You will have automatic reactions, automatic insights, and automatic thoughts about everything that is put in front of you, no matter what.
Nothing can take that away from you.
Your value is ALSO your self-questioning, your self-doubt, and your uncertainty.
Because that is actually your value machine automatically improving itself.
So you have all your past experience and automatic insights and everything you bring to the table right now.
AND you have an automatic improvement mechanism that's always looking around and saying, “How could I have done that better?”
So you don't have to create value or measure “How much value did I create today, inputs or outputs?”
You ARE value. You bring it with you wherever you go.
You have a value machine running in your brain all the time that you can't turn off, and this is constantly improving itself.
So here's the right question to ask yourself to decide whether or not you had a productive day.
How well did you steward your value machine? How well did you invest in it and take care of it?
Did you give it rest?
Did you give it stimulation and different kinds of things to do?
Did you give it a sense of purpose and direction?
Did you help it get unstuck, if necessary?
Did you have your own back when it really wanted to doubt itself, and take the insight within the doubt, but also clear away the unnecessary stress and fear around the doubt?
Did you listen to the insights that it had to give you?
Those are the real measures of whether or not you had a productive day.
Because you can work 8, 10, 12 hours…
But if you do that by berating yourself and working from stress, you are running down your value machine. You're hurting it in the long term.
And you can get tons of stuff done and produce lots of outputs…
But if it's not actually what you want to be doing, and there’s a little voice in your head saying, “Wait, this isn't even the direction I want to go in,” and you're not listening to it…
That’s also you running down your most valuable asset, which is your brain and your insights.
So instead of worrying about how much time or effort you spent working today, or how much you got done, I want you to worry about only one thing:
How good of a job are you doing in taking care of and investing in the value machine that is already in you?
You already have the golden goose.
It lays golden eggs every day, because that’s just what it does.
How well are you taking care of it?
Are you keeping it fed and watered and safe and protected?
Or are you constantly on the verge of killing it, trying to get 100 eggs today at the cost of 0 eggs forever in the future?
This is way easier said than done. We're very used to thinking in terms of inputs and outputs, and it can be very hard to think of yourself in this way.
Your brain probably has a bunch of objections already for why it doesn't want to think this way!
So it’s not only going to take repetition and practice to really implement this mindset…
It's also going to take a bunch of conversations with your brain to uncover all the reasons that it wants to resist this perspective, and address them one by one until you and your brain are on the same side.
And the payoff is that you will build trust with yourself and you'll be able to fully tap into your own unique genius and insight.
And those are the only two things that can possibly enable you to create the life that you actually want.
You can't do it without self-trust and self-knowledge.
So if you really want to do this… If you’re ready to get started…
Come talk to me and let's get it done.
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