The Ultimate Productivity System

Tired of complicated, long winded productivity systems that end up wasting your time – and leaving you more confused?

I’ve been there.

Too often you’ve probably seen it yourself – you or someone close to you is trying to improve their life, get organized, and instead they get bogged down in some complicated system.

I’ve seen people start out with good intentions, but then get stuck spending more time maintaining their system than actually doing their tasks.  That’s why the ultimate productivity system needs to be something simple, and keeps in mind the secret to really accomplishing what you desire.

That secret?

It is simply this:

Do Something That Matters.

But it’s not that simple. How do you evaluate whether a system is good or not? I’ll give you a simple test:

The Ultimate Productivity Test: Leverage vs. Overhead

I think a lot about efficiency and making the most out of my time.  In The Action Solution, one of my very fundamental beliefs is that you have to have high leverage activities.

I’m always focused on this, not necessarily in the realm of trying to “do more stuff” – but in my overall life, is it helping me out

So if you’re considering doing something hoping to make more time, or prioritize better, or whatever the case may be: make sure it’s high leverage, high return on investment training technique.

That is, you should be able to put just a little time and effort in, and get a lot of time and saved effort out in the long run.

What’s The Worst Case Scenario?

The opposite of high leverage, high return is high overhead – almost like overloading a bureaucracy. Overhead is time that you spend maintaining something so it can function.  Like brushing your teeth everyday, that’s overhead for your mouth. Changing the oil in your car, overhead for your car.  Balancing your checkbook manually is overhead for your finances.

Organizing a to-do list, calendar, etc – all those tasks are the overhead you pay for trying to maintain a productive system

Some overhead is unavoidable, and the best case scenario of course is that small overhead payment actually turns into a high return on investment activity. For example, if you spend 5 minutes planning out a task, so you do it more efficiently and save way more than 5 minutes.

However, a high overhead scenario happens where you’re spending so much time maintaining a system, you’re not getting any results out of the system.  

So really, the ultimate system comes down to minimizing overhead, and maximizing your leverage and return on investment.

In my experience, the best way to do this is to minimize how much effort it takes to maintain a system.

How To Have The Least Overhead?

The more effort you have to do to “force” yourself to be productive, the more effort it’s going to take to maintain that system – because the “system” is what you’re trying to have change your life.

That’s why instead, if you can depend less on the system and more on yourself, you can reduce that overhead.

I think you should focus on transforming habits, transforming the way you do things, transforming your underlying beliefs so you become someone who goes about their life with clarity on what you want – and simply do it.  I know it sounds so easy when I say it like that, but of course that transition is complex. That’s basically what the whole Action Solution is about.

So lets get right to it – this is what the ultimate productivity system would look like, if you could boil it down to this.

The Steps In The Ultimate Productivity System

  1. Do Something That Matters. Need help with figuring out what matters to you?  We cover it early on in personal development 101, sign up free!
  2. If You’re Motivated –  Keep working. (Check out my tips on getting motivated)
  3. If You’re Tired – Take a break.
  4. When You’re Satisfied – You’re done for the day!

The Ultimate Getting Things Done Productivity System Flowchart

Now I know this seems simple, but the truth is this:

The aim of all productivity systems is to cut through the haze of your tasks, and get you to focus on the most important task that you can do right now.

So, if your productivity system, isn’t helping you focus on what’s most important to you, it’s [ninja-popup ID=5955]failing at it’s job[/ninja-popup].

Sometimes we overcomplicate things, and need to just get back to the basics.  And that’s why the ultimate productivity system boils down to this:

Do Something That Matters.

Further Reading