“We shall never have more time. We have, and always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until tomorrow. Keep going… Concentrate on something useful.” Arnold Bennett

There has been a trend recently of understanding what Productivity is and isn’t, and the realisation by many (myself included) that tweaking your productivity system doesn’t necessarily make you a better worker, person or anything else.

In the last week I have seen two posts that show this trend:

1. Jonathan Mead, regular contributor at Zen Habits helping us in a tongue in cheek way to understand that we make be productivity junkies.

2. The excellent Lateral Action highlights a post by Merlin Mann on the changing route of his 43folders blog (perhaps a blog that can be ‘blamed’ in part for the productivity movement’s overkill).

I  have been there, done that and got the moleskine notebooks with the over-the-top productivity systems. I proposed a 12 Step Programme for overcoming your Productivity Addiction several weeks ago. The thing is this, productivity is not about how your work out what you have to do and organise it, productivity is about using your time in the most efficient way to create more time for yourself. I have always been more of a fan of the world efficiency over productivity. Efficiency conjures up images of doing something well and doing something in a way that doesn’t waste time or resources. Productivity makes me think of car production where you want to increase your productivity which essentially means making more units per hour. In this way productivity is about creating more things in the time you have, efficiency (the true core of productivity) is creating more time to do more things (that you want to).

This is key to the principle of my blog. Just check out my about me page (which I will be massively updating soon as it hasn’t changed since I started blogging back in April). Essentially I want to create more time to do to do the things that I want to do, and pursue my Lifestyle Projects.

What are you thoughts on the productivity movement? Do you have any examples of productivity overkill? Let me know in the comments below!

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Bits & Bobs:

• Don’t forget you can follow me in real-time on Twitter.
• I’m planning a series of competitions on my blog starting very soon. Make sure you are subscribed for more updates.
• I’ve also been reading about keeping things simple and concise so I thought I’d try a shorter post. Got another post coming your way this week.
  

Image Credit: by Spankmeeehard on Flickr via Creative Commons

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Time for Three:
Reading around the web:

• http://jayfrawley.com/2008/12/02/are-you-making-a-dying-instead-of-a-living-here-are-7-clues-you-might-be/
  
• http://www.willitchangeyou.com/so-you%E2%80%99ve-heard-it-all-before-part-4-what-next/
• http://motivatethyself.com/2008/12/05/let-us-give-your-blog-a-boost/

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Thanks for reading.

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