“Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. Exhaustion affects your quality and productivity.”

~ Jeff VanderMeer

I don’t know about you but I’ve never felt comfortable with the term productivity. It all too often felt like a standard I could never quite reach and to do so would require me to be almost robotic like in my work habits. Inherent in the term, for me, was this idea of doing more which for someone who already does a lot felt punishing.

Several years ago, my views on productivity shifted big time. After a tricky year beset with illness and, dare I say it, a certain level of burnout in 2018, I realised that my habit of putting my head down and soldiering on wasn’t really working for me. Working harder wasn’t bringing me greater results, if anything they were declining.

So towards the end of that year, in my search for a more easeful way to balance being a full-time business owner and Mama to an energetic toddler, I came across a number of books that turned my ideas about productivity on their head. These books included:

Joyful Productivity by George Kao

Deep Work by Cal Newport

Sabbath by Wayne Muller

The case for rest

As I read these books (all of which I highly recommend), I realised that they all kept pointing to the same thing. They all argued the case for rest. Rest you might think is the enemy of productivity but here’s where I had a real epiphany. It absolutely isn’t.

Because guess what? As obvious as it might sound, we cannot do our best work if we don’t get sufficient rest. Not just that, but being productive — because as creative business owners, we absolutely do want to produce things of value for our audience — is not about working harder and working more. It’s about having the time we do work be truly focused and deep.

It’s about working smarter. Something we are only capable of in short bursts, punctuated by breaks that allow us to rest and renew our energy.

When we’re busy, which, as entrepreneurs is much of the time, it can feel extremely counter-intuitive to take a break, to put down what we’re working on and walk away but in doing so, when we return to the task at hand, what we have is renewed energy and an even greater ability to truly focus. This in turn makes us more productive than we would have been without the break.

Before my epiphany about productivity, I never really took breaks. I sat hunched over my keyboard for hours at a time and basically wore myself out. After that fateful year, I made some huge changes to how I worked which brought about some surprising results, including, but not limited to, generating huge jumps in revenue, year on year ever since.

Less is more

The changes I implemented that led to the turning point in my business growth included:

• scheduling and taking more breaks during the course of my working day.
• Looking for and implementing ways to simplify my business activities, which meant taking on fewer new projects as I focused on content creation and outreach.
• I also stepped off the treadmill of creating new things for my audience and instead built upon what I already had in place.

Since making these changes back in 2019, my business growth has been greater than all the years preceding.

This helped me to see that the idea that creating and offering more will generate more income is not necessarily true. Instead, what I now believe is that doing less but doing it well (i.e. working smarter vs working harder) actually leads to greater growth.

We absolutely don’t have to wait until we get sick, burn out or have a baby before we take sufficient breaks, simplify our activities or focus hard on the task in front of us. Instead, we can start to do so right now before it becomes a necessity and reap the benefits of doing so.

My invitation to you is to take some time to answer the following 3 questions so that you too can take a more sustainable approach to productivity:

1. What can I stop doing that will give me more time to work on the things that matter?

2. How can I change my work schedule to incorporate more breaks and opportunities for rest?

3. What are the key business growth strategies I plan to focus and go deep on this year? Which ones can I then eliminate.