Are you productive or busy?

Today I wanted to touch upon a crucial thing that most of us are guilty of.

We set ourselves during the day, time blocks that we assign to time for work or time for relaxation. That way, we know when to do and what time is meant for what.

The problem starts when we assign a time block for work in which we don’t have set and strict rules on what to do.

Imagine you are working on an app, and you have 100 things on your to-do list. First off, when you start, you will most likely choose the easiest out of the 100 and start with them. At some point, you will come across something related to design and instead of solely doing the TODO. Instead, you will spend the rest of the time block obsessing on the colour of the button that you implemented.

That is busy work. The definition of busy work for me is doing something that doesn’t move you forward in any way.

Changing button colour, researching a framework or database difference while still not having a built app, scaling your app from day 0 even though the app is not even public yet. Worrying about hosting issues while you have 0 traffic and so forth.

All of these are examples of what busy work can look like.

And don’t think this is only relevant to those that code, not even close. Every single activity has examples of busywork. Work that keeps you engaged while, in reality, achieving nothing as a result. That can be tricky to identify, but it is the biggest reason why people don’t achieve their level of success even though they spend a lot of time “working”.

If you are guilty of this and you have found yourself in the description above, I want to first off congratulate you on admitting your mistakes, a big step for you. And second I want to give you a solution.

The next time you have a time block of 2 hours that you will work on, spend 10 minutes going through TO-DOs and giving them the maximum timer spent and importance. That way, you can and should be tuned in on things that matter and really are hard and stop worrying about things that don’t matter even in the slightest.

I have been really passionate about the whole thing of writing code, so understanding things such as this doesn’t come easily. As long as you critically think of activities that you do, you can manage to eliminate busywork from every part of your life.

Start now. Get perfect later.

Klim Y