Evaluate Yourself On Output, Not On Activity

 

Evaluate Yourself On Output, Not On Activity

I have a colleague who would become very excited when starting a project., his enthusiasm was understandable. In the beginning, he would gather his materials, make lists, reach out to patrons make phone calls, a flurry of activities that made the Road Runner look slow. Inevitably, as time went on, my friend’s enthusiasm for the project would begin to wane. Tasks would remain unfinished, phone calls would go unreturned for days and sometimes weeks. The project would sometimes be passed off to an underline to finish and some projects would just remain undone in favor of the excitement of something new. There was no interest in completion —  in the process that takes a brilliant idea to final product. My friend remained consistently busy, but his productivity was dismal. He would be the first to tell you how hard working he was, but he had very little to show for it. He measured himself on activity, not on output. Baseball players get paid to hit the ball, not just swing it.

The same can be said of people who spend half the day answering email and reading and engaging in social media. These are activities that can’t be monetized, they don’t result in anything concrete. Yet people spend so much of their day on this time and they wonder why they are “busy” and never accomplish half of what they set out to do in a twelve-hour period.

I have learned my lesson and changed for the better. When I wake up in the morning, I think about what I can do for the next few hours that will get me closer to a personal goal or a project. Email, social media, and non-urgent phone calls can wait until after I have accomplished the tasks that get me closer to my goals, such as going over production schedules, shipment dates, specific customers’ requirements, bespoke orders, and any outstanding orders from the planning department.

You can go through hundreds of pieces of paper every day, but if it doesn’t make any money or get you closer to a goal, it is pointless busy work. Being active without accomplishing anything has real consequences. It’s easy to get stuck in this pattern, days, weeks and months and even years pass, and before you know it, the strategic plan you’ve been thinking about has not been implemented, the novel you want to write remains just a thought, and the triathlon you wanted to run this year has come and gone. You never got to where you thought you were going. How many goals have you wanted to reach that still remain pipe dreams?

I am sure you have a to-do list. My guess is that it has a mix of items that range from practical (pick up dry-cleaning, buy dog food) to the timely (get the quarterly report done, pay taxes) to the lofty (write the screenplay, learn Italian). How many of these items do you check off at the end of the day? The dry cleaning and the dog food? Okay, great. Did they get you any closer to your real goals? You have to check in with yourself at the end of each day to see if you actually accomplished anything important. Did you have meaningful output, or were you busy all day running errands, pushing papers, or bitching about your workload to colleagues?

We tend to get stuck on procedural and busywork — when we need to stop doing these things and work hard on our lives. If all day you are doing busy work, when do you find the time to better your situation? At what point do you start working on your life? You have to allocate time to make your life better, whether it’s half an hour learning something new, or spending half an hour a day on the novel you want to write so that it will get done. If we allow errands to take over our future, we will have no future. All we have is today. We need to identify that just being in our lives is not enough, it’s when we work on our lives that life improves.

That’s all for now, my friends. See you all in my next articles.

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