Productivity: Are We Doing It Wrong?
Productivity has been on my mind lately. Dictionary definition is:
“The state or quality of producing something.”
The interpretation of this can be incredibly subjective depending on who is considering it. For a farmer, crops. For a retail environment, sales targets. For a woman, it can mean so much more.
For a woman, it can mean performance in the workplace. It can mean being the Instagram, Pinterest perfect mom. It can mean having an immaculately ordered house, having that toned body that makes other women envious, wearing the latest styles, having great hair, great nails, great teeth, perfectly behaved and polite children who are thriving, volunteering at dance and soccer, being active on the PAC. It can mean ALL of these things simultaneously. And if we don’t live up to it, what then?
Do you ever think we are setting ourselves up to fail at an epic level? I do.
In my counselling practice, I often hear women explaining how anxious they are all of the time. When I ask them what their life looks like, more often than not, they outline something similar to above. We are letting all our friends down by not acknowledging how much of a load they carry.
Let’s talk about this from a brain perspective. The left brain is all about effort, reasoning, doing. The right brain is all about creativity. As a society, we have grown to favour the left brain. So, if we are constantly living in the left brain, then the creativity of the right brain is becoming stifled. The right brain activity allows us creativity to problem solve and invent new and fabulous ways to do things. It also allows us the creativity to think outside the box to even be able to identify WHY we are anxious.
Now we have identified this, what can we do about it? We could start with doing less. Here is an activity I often give to my clients to consider:
· Think about your life and all the things you do
· Make a list of these things
· Put next to each item a symbol/emoji that identifies one of the following:
1) Something you HAVE to do
2) Something that brings you JOY
3) Something you want to do LESS of
4) Something you want to do MORE of
· Take a look at the symbols and see how balanced your life is and what areas have an excess, and which ones are lacking.
· Brainstorm some ideas to find more balance.
To simplify all of this, I suppose I am saying that in order to achieve more wholeness and be more productive, we need to DO LESS, and BE MORE within our creative selves. We need to take a step back from our “to-do lists” and do things that bring us joy and allow us to spend time with ourselves to engage our right brains.
If you found this helpful, and it gave you something to think about, subscribe to our mailing list.