The best and most effective lessons tend to be learned the hard way. I recall over ten years ago when I started my first job, my calendar was almost empty most of the time. Didn’t really have the concept of a calendar then. I hardly had plans other than work, watching movies and series, and occasionally meeting with friends. Any day of the week. As time went by, my calendar started filling up. When my work duties increased, I struggled to make time for other activities. This resulted in shifting the watching of movies, series and meeting up with friends to weekends. Suddenly I felt like I was always busy.
The sudden busyness was not unique to me, as many of my friends – who I had gone to school with – were having a similar experience. I now had to make appointments in advance to meet up with people, compared to a few hours’ notice or no notice previously. Being busy was also cool.
The busyness was seen as a good thing; it meant one was heading the right direction to fulfilling their goals and dreams; sometimes it just meant one was not wasting their life being idle. I recall joining a few startups and co-founding some as well – which mostly consisted of friends. I was active in about five entrepreneurship ventures. At the time, I was more than happy to be part of any venture that came my way. Little did I know this busyness was going to cost me a lot of time and money.
After several years of being busy, I realised that most of the things I was busy with were not making much progress. This is because I committed myself to so many things, that I was struggling to make meaningful contributions to each of them. That is when I realised that being productive was the really cool thing to pursue – not being busy.
My productivity journey has led me to focus on a few things at a time. It is easier to do one thing, and do it well, compared to multitasking. I eventually made the hard decision to quit four of the entrepreneurship ventures, in order to reassess my commitments. That was a great decision. It is because of that decision that I am able to make time to write this. As this is a journey, I am still learning and will share lessons learned in future posts. Strive to be productive – not busy.