"Never confuse movement with action." - Ernest Hemingway
Yesterday we discussed how action is the all-important engine of your productivity vehicle. Today, you’re going to learn a method for identifying the most impactful actions in your life.
When it comes to productivity, it's easy to confuse busyness for progress.
Cramming our schedule with low-impact activities creates a feeling of forward momentum, but in reality it gets us nowhere.
This is why, despite always being busy—some people seem to never get anywhere in life. They spin their wheels, pushing harder and harder until they burn out. Just to repeat the cycle again without realising what they’re doing wrong.
Like a rocking horse in constant motion, but never actually moving forward.
The key to real progress lies in discerning which actions actually contribute to our goals and which merely give the illusion of productivity. This distinction is critical because activity does not always equate to effectiveness.
Investor and modern philosopher Naval Ravikant put it nicely when he said: “What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work”.
What he means is you must find the high leverage activities and people in your life. Those that provide outsized returns for the time you invest in them.
In many cases, we instead fall into the trap of what's known as 'busy work' – tasks that occupy time but don't necessarily move us closer to our objectives. This could be incessant checking of emails, attending unnecessary meetings, or getting caught up in administrative tasks that could be delegated or streamlined. While these activities might make our days feel packed and exhausting, they often have little impact on our actual progress.
So, the goal is to understand the difference between being 'busy' and being 'productive'. It's about focusing on tasks that bring significant value and progress, rather than those that merely fill time.
This focus on high leverage activities and relationships is the cornerstone of true productivity.
When people say “work smarter, not harder”, this is what they mean.
In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto was out in his garden when he noticed something peculiar: 20% of his peas were producing 80% of his crop. He soon noticed the same phenomenon in other areas of his life, and thus the Pareto Principle was born.
It states: 20% of our efforts produce 80% of our results.