I stopped doing “things & stuff” at work and you can too

The best way to describe my approach to work is: find inspiration in what I’m doing and get stuck in

Aliyar
2 min readSep 14, 2023
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash

I’ve never been obsessed with productivity. Anyone who knows anything about productivity can tell you that it’s a bad idea.

For one, ‘inspiration’ is elusive and most of the work we do most of the time is anything but inspirational.

The other reason is that many of us have too many demands on our time.

Between meetings, stand-ups, Teams calls, and emails, our schedules have become too scattered to make enough time to focus on any one thing for long enough and without distraction.

For the longest part of my career, I used to do my ‘work’ — the things that helped me improve my business and get better at my job after 6 pm.

So, what did I do while I was actually at work, you ask?

Well, I don’t have a better way to describe it other than “things & stuff”.

It’s not that spending my day attending every single client meeting, team meetings, and answering every single email or IM as soon as it arrived was a waste of time.

It’s just that there’s no way to tell.

In other words:

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

— Lewis Carroll

Figuring out whether something is a good or bad investment of your time starts with knowing what you’re after.

Without that objectivity, you can’t scale or optimise the benefits of your effort.

I believe that everyone wants to do meaningful work, and we want to see the impact of our effort on the world around us.

As Cal Newport writes in Deep Work:

“In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.”

— Cal Newport

Maybe you also recognise that you’ve been busy doing “things & stuff”?

We’ve all been there, and there’s only one way to stop.

  1. Set a clear metric to measure the impact of your activity on your most important goal.
  2. Communicate that metric loud and clear to everyone.
  3. Commit to everything that moves the needle on that goal in a measurable way.
  4. Kill everything else.

--

--

Aliyar
Aliyar

Written by Aliyar

Professional Expert Generalist.

No responses yet