The Keys to Essential Meaningful Productivity

How do you make sure that you are not being busy just for the sake of busyness? How do you insure the work you are doing has a greater purpose than just another item to cross off of your to-do list?

Read on to see how Leo Babauta from ZenHabits answers those questions.

You can actually do this in an infinite number of ways, but here are some elements I’ve found to be important in my own exploration:

1. Work on what matters. Do you know your most important tasks for today? For the week? For the month? For your mission or life? This is something to get clear on. We don’t always have to be perfect, but the idea is to know what’s essential, and to focus on that more of the time.
   
2. Structure sessions. Most of us just go through the day doing random things at random times, with no structure. Some people structure their days so rigidly that there’s no room for spontaneity or rest. The middle way, I’ve found, is to create structured sessions: 30 minutes for working on an essential task, for example. Or 90 minutes for writing. 15 minutes to process your inbox or messages. Two ideas: do your top most important task for 60-90 minutes at the start of every day. First thing. Second, do focused pomodoro sessions (25 minutes of focus on one task) 6 times throughout the day, every day.
   
3. Pour yourself into it. Put meaning & joy into each session. OK, you’re starting a session. Make this a meaningful session — first, by reminding yourself why this is meaningful to you. Second, by pouring yourself into it fully, as if this were the most important thing in the universe. The only thing in the universe. Third, let yourself play, find joy, or otherwise /feel alive/ during this session!
   
4. Turn towards instead of away. You will feel uncertainty, fear or discomfort around some of your most important tasks. That’s called “groundlessness” — the uncertainty of not having solid ground under your feet. Instead of turning away, turn towards this task. Stay with the groundlessness, mindfully. Be present with the fear and uncertainty, but don’t let it force you to exit. Let it be an act of love and devotion to stay in the middle of the groundlessness as you do the task.
   
5. Put smaller things into focused sessions. It might be true that few individual emails or messages or errands are going to be essential — so under the guidelines above, you might think you should never answer those emails or messages, never do the errands. But doing errands, paying bills, answering emails — these are all important at some level. The juggernaut of your mission will grind to a halt if you never maintain the engine. So the answer is to batch less important (but still necessary) tasks into focused sessions. Spend 15-20 minutes processing email, for example. These batch sessions become essential.

There are other ways to work with these ideas. For example, you might spend half a day, or an entire week, focused entirely on something really essential. You might structure your day so that you are doing certain tasks at certain times — meditate and write in the morning, messages and meetings and workouts in the afternoons, for example. But none of that is essential to the approach.

The main idea is to have structured sessions for essential tasks, turn toward the groundlessness and pour yourself into it with meaning and joy. It’s that simple.