What Kind Of Productive Are You?

Most Americans feel exhausted after their day is over and workplaces are flooded with unhappy and distracted employees. According to a survey conducted by FlexJobs, only 7% of the people in corporate America feel “most productive” during work hours at the office.

Recently, Gallup carried out an extensive study, which concluded that only 33% of workers are highly engaged in their workplace, while the rest are either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged.” This mean they were unhappy and not providing positive contributions, or worse destroying the hard word of the engaged workers.

Productivity has many forms, including the various emotions generated by the different types of productivity. But the one thing they have in common is that happiness should always be the result of whatever we do.

What Are The Different Kinds of Productivity?

Everyday we take actions and fill our days doing something. You may even be busy taking non-actions, where you decide to do nothing. That’s still an action. All those actions or non-actions cause us to get results, which are going to trigger or cause emotions within us, from happiness to sadness.

So when you’re asked, what kind of productive are you? What’s really being questioned is, what results and emotions do you actions result in? Or do your actions produce things like stress, chaos, overwhelm, shame, disappointment, or maybe even failure?

What Are Your Daily Systems and Resulting Emotions?

The daily systems that we’re subscribing to are either going to set us up to succeed or fail. These systems might produce positive emotions which help us feel good, build our confidence and they make achieving our goals more fun.

Or they may set us up each day to fail and produce emotions like frustration and disappointment. When you’re experiencing frustration and disappointment it feels almost impossible to reach your goals.

We need to create a day where we are producing more of the emotions that we desire like satisfaction and fulfillment, growth and love. But if we want more of those things, we’re going to have to intentionally plan a day where we’re questioning ourselves whether our day is a recipe for happiness or something else?

How To Plan Your Day For ‘Happy Productivity’

From a silly baking experiment from my childhood, I learned how a bit of misunderstanding can change the entire recipe from getting the perfect results to ending up with a complete disaster. When I used the right type of sugar I was getting successful results.

Here’s the deal. Planning our day isn’t much different.

To better understand what we want our day to look like, we need to first reflect to get clear on the emotions we want more of during the day. This can make a big difference. It can be the wrong kind of sugar we’re putting in our day versus the right kind by just not taking the time to understand what we want to experience. Now, I love the cake analogy.

If you’re going to bake a cake, you’d probably search some recipes on Google or Pinterest. Your day is no different. You can take out a few minutes and ask yourself things like what kind of emotions you want to bake into your cake today.

These emotions could be any sorts of great things. It could be little fun or maybe you want to bake in some laughter today, some peace or some calm, or maybe you just want to bake in some more happiness.

Practice this more often to be happily productive throughout your day!

Different Ways To ‘Bake In Happiness’ Into Your Day

Experiences

These are simple things like driving your new car. For me taking out my truck to the barn while listening to my favorite music brings me lots of joy. Or maybe eating some of our favorite foods or maybe taking or planning a trip, or merely just sitting outside in nature. It’s those little things that we’re experiencing that bring us joy.

You might feel like scoffing, and you may not take out the time to step back and reflect. This type of neglecting behavior will bring you no good. Rather reflecting and planning some positive experiences into your day will help you achieve joy and abundance.

Growth

When we learn something new it makes us happy. Maybe you’re learning something new reading this article right now. You might be experiencing joy by relating to something you read in here, or maybe you’re simply finding it fun. Learning feels really, really good. And it makes us happy.

When we work nonstop, we eliminate the time for learning new things and personal growth. If you love expanding your skillset and growing, then missing out on personal growth might leave you unhappy and mad.

You can bring back more personal growth in your life by incorporating simple things such as reading, gardening, learning how to play an instrument, developing a new skill or build a workout routine.

If we only stop forcing ourselves to do the things we think we ‘should’ do, we can put an end to this lazy and slacking attitude that we may witness throughout the day. We will start to see growth and productivity.

Contribution

Contribution is about being in service to others, and this gives meaning to our lives. But it’s crucial not to confuse contribution with behaviors such as slaving away for everybody and putting everybody else first only to be bitter and resentful.

Contribution is all about showing up in a good place because, sometimes the contribution is to ourselves first so that we have a full battery. Serve yourself first and from a full cup serve others. When we are in service to others, it helps to give meaning to our lives. It could be anything from being just a great parent to your kid, it could be just a five-minute thing. It might mean volunteer work for you.

It could even mean just showing up at your workplace in a spirit of love and compassion. Instead of showing up in a state of resentment or anger just because you’re mad that you have to be there.

The Secret to Productivity: Find Your Passion to Boost Your Proficiency

It’s important to understand the meaningful and powerful difference between doing the things we think we should be doing and doing the things that are driven by our passion. When we get clear on the experience we want to have, we become capable of outperforming our lazy and inactive self. When you’re doing those things in life that really matter to you, the result is going to create more positive emotions.

There’s so much more joy to be found in the living up to your potential. Even if it’s something small, every little action forward matters. You will feel good just doing the simplest things in life. They’ll be producing bliss.

All these activities that you are doing now are exactly the same as in the old days but not like the old way. You’re not beating yourself up and staying miserable and exhausted by pushing and forcing yourself to do day-to-day activities.

How Can You Achieve Bliss?

Take out a few minutes and look at your day, and break it down into segments without any judgment whatsoever. Are there areas in your day where you would stay the same? Because they involve the things that you enjoy and it feels really wonderful. Are there segments that you need to change so that you can produce a different emotion from that segment?

For example, maybe you hate doing dishes. But how about if one of you turned this around in your dishwashing time by starting to listen to your favorite podcasts, or a personal growth program when you’re doing the dishes?

So now that same time that you’re using to do the dishes, you might actually start to look forward to it because you get to learn and grow.

My advice is to take your day piece by piece. Look at any areas where you might be using the wrong kind of sugar, so it’s coming out as a disaster. And see if you can put the right kind of sugar in there to get those results that you want.

You can achieve it easily through a planner like the Best Planner Ever. Planners allow you to flip back through the pages and see how your time is being spent. They also help you to break your day into segments and evaluate yourself in those individual segments. You can analyze which segments generate the emotions that you want and which produce the ones that you don’t.

CONCLUSION

It is encouraging to take out some time and look at the emotions that your daily actions are producing. Get clear on what kind of productive do you want to be and what kind of emotions do you want to feel.

And then, once you’re clear on that, start setting up your productivity around those experiences and emotions. You can try that by making some shifts in your beliefs or changing the way you analyze things. So that you can produce those emotions that you really want to see more of in your day and bring more bliss into your life!

If you found this article helpful, consider joining Goal Achievers, which is our coaching community where we dive deep into a topic relevant to living a full and extraordinary life each month. We focus on just one topic at a time so the process isn’t overwhelming and we help you take small powerful steps forward towards the life of your dreams.

If you are a business owner, you can also join us at Inner Circle, our business coaching program where we take you by the hand to help you eliminate frustration, stress, and overwhelm from your business so you can achieve the results you really want.

You can also pick up a copy of the Best Planner Ever, or my book The Joy Guide.

xo

Jennifer

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