Best wisdom ever on Productivity

[Jon]

I came across a nugget of wisdom recently that resonated with me immensely when it comes to productivity. It is so simple yet so profound. Here it is: "You don't decide your future. You decide your habits and your habits decide your future."

So true! What we do is a result of our habits, largely. In fact, this leads me onto another great saying: "There is no change without a change of routine."

We don't make real productive change unless we change what we habitually do, because habits define who we are and our typical behaviour patterns. In fact, this is related to yet another well known quote, by Einstein was it?

"The definition of stupid is to carry on doing the same thing and expect a different result."

So in essence, to improve your productivity, forge different habits. It is all about the routine.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

While I absolutely don't disagree with you, your idea gives me an insight as to discussions of "government waste, abuse, and inefficiency." The thing that comes to mind is that government supervisors don't supervise that much because (a) they may be in the job they now hold due to the Peter Principle, having risen to the level of their incompetence, and (b) they frequently have a lot of reports to write and interactions to trigger so don't have time to get out and "talk to the troops."

The only way that they know their people are working correctly is to set up an office routine, a "procedure" to be followed, or a "protocol" for interactions. Then if you break protocol without permission, they can do something (usually a type of overkill) to enforce conformance. With such rules in place, it is very difficult to change your habits significantly, unless you change your job. Which explains the turnover rate frequently found in high-tech government environments. The bright minds get bored beyond belief and look for greener pastures. If they are bright enough, those pastures are out there. And the ones who stay behind are those who don't really want to think too hard anyway. So they take the rote jobs because they aren't bright enough to find the real challenges.

I know that my inability to change all of my routines was tempered by the interesting clause in our contracts that allowed us to develop specialized programs as tools to help us do our jobs if no commercial software was available. And since I was often a one-man shop on the main project for which I was the only specialist of that subject in the whole department, anything I could do to make things better was accepted.

My biggest database project came from the need to track the security status of 1200-1500 systems (growing over time) for 60 to 80 projects (growing...) for an average of 35 (plus/minus 5) major new security bulletins per month, to be managed by 40 people (fluctuating every quarter). I had the ability to change everyone's reporting habits and my boss loved me for it, because HIS life was pure Hell from having to previously build his reports by hand by collating data from 40 variable-content spreadsheets, one per sys admin.

I'm not dwelling on the database itself, but rather the idea that I could change the way we did things to make an improvement in communications, record-keeping, and report-building. I see it as a corroborating example of Jon's "Break the routine" idea.

 

[Bee]

My Nana was a depository and dispenser of wisdom. She had two pieces of advice that have always stuck with me:

1. If you do what you always do, you'll get what you always got. (ie - no change without change)
2. Say what you are going to do, then do it.

Without wishing to sound trite, it's the wisdom I return to over and over - particularly when I am stuck.

 

[Jon]

These all revolve around the central theme: unless you make a permanent change, then you will just end up carrying on before with the same results. Use up all your energy to form the habits. Then your brain uses the basal ganglia to run that habit on autopilot, preserving glucose for your pre-frontal cortex to use for executive functions, like deliberative decision making.