¿Somos realmente productivos?

0:07 Hello everyone and welcome to ideas for a better life. I am Eugenio fencer Ruiz, Doctor, stubborn and lover in personal development. Today I want to talk to you about smart productivity. But before I start, I want to remind you that you have at your disposal a compilation of the most relevant ideas and tips on personal development. In my four books you already know them free, healthy and happy, thirty- one days to improve your life, minimalism for normal people and seven steps for a purposeful life. I leave you their link in the notes of the episode and also since many of you have asked me and you are asking me how and where to train in personal development.

0:57 I tell you what has worked for me, which is the personal or online development master' s degree, from IPP' s Institute of Positive Thinking. You know, it is the best training that exists in this field, the only one that covers in depth the six areas of life, self- knowledge, body and health, emotions, relationships, transcendence and money and professional career. If you want to take a look at your free master clash. I leave you the link in the episode notes and now we' re going to talk about smart productivity. We' re exhausted, no matter who you ask people. She seems to be always messy, she seems to be always exhausted, she seems to always run head to head from one side to the other.

1:49 We have the feeling that we don' t have time for absolutely nothing, and I wonder if the time has not come to challenge that culture of accelerated rhythm and to start focusing on doing things with meaning, on doing things with the aim of lasting in time, not with the aim of crossing items into a list of immense tasks. I believe that in our relentless pursuit of productivity, in that obsession with productivity that we all have, we have fallen into a trap and that trap is generating complete and absolute exhaustion. And if you' re exhausted, you can' t create that in the end it ' s what we' ve come to this world for, that is, that sometimes understanding productivity as a race is hurting us. I think the secret is perhaps to do less, work at a slower pace and give priority to quality over quantity. And for that, the first thing we have to do is confront the beliefs that have brought us to this point. We have always been conditioned in this modern culture to believe that a good job is something that requires a lot of activity, that answering more emails, doing more tasks,

3:21 having more meetings is somehow equivalent to having better results. And that is a wrong mentality that is leading us to value visibility, which is something completely different from productivity. We are leading to value that visibility above creation. And, as I say, that' s not productivity. That' s visibility, but it' s not productivity because when you' re doing all those tasks, you' re not really creating anything. And I think the problem comes because productivity in modern office jobs is very difficult to measure and this is a difference from what was traditionally happening in industry, for example, in factories that produced tangible products that could be counted. This person has produced x toys or x cans of I don' t know what, but in an office, in a modern job, we don' t have clear parameters to measure our productivity. Then, as we do not have them, we have chosen to value more the visible activity, the things that are seen than to measure the actual results, even if that means blurring the limits that exist between work and personal life. And you can imagine what the result of doing something like that

4:54 is, or maybe you' re already living it in your own flesh. Modern workers are increasingly stressed out, they have increasingly difficult agendas to manage, they spend more and more hours in front of the computer screen and, obviously, many end up burning because there is no body or mind that can withstand this constant avalanche of emails, meetings, deadlines, etc. And it doesn ' t have to be that way. What I' m saying is that we start valuing quality above quantity and if we do that, it' s going to happen that we' re going to do a better job and, besides, that we' re going to get our time and our energy back.

5:45 What I' m saying is that we start focusing on what really matters, instead of doing things because it does, because it touches, because someone has asked us to, that we stop doing a lot of things to do a few things right, because more is not always better. And that would be productivity, real productivity, and not the cult we have today for activity, not for productivity, although we think it is the same for activity. I believe that the pandemic has begun to change this situation a little. I think we' re better off than we were five years ago. Many companies that went to work remotely during the covid are now seeing how their workers have some resistance to returning to the office, and that resistance I think is not just because they want to avoid displacements or because they want someone to work in pajamas. It' s great to take those two things off. It is phenomenal but from home it is easier to avoid pseudo- productivity, i e activity rather than productivity. It' s easier to avoid meetings. It is easier to avoid activity by activity, which is what characterizes any day in any office. Of course, the question is how we can adapt the teachings of the truly productive professions. I am thinking of musicians, artists, scientists, writers, how we can adapt their way of working to the reality of a

7:16 normal job, because the key to these professions is to do few things every day, but to do them very well. The most prolific writers, for example, all have methodical work habits, work habits that are oriented to quality and not quantity. And, above all, these kinds of professions, these kinds of professionals often say not to almost everything. On the other hand, in today' s working culture, the normal working culture, to say that it does tend to be considered a positive thing. And if what we aspire to is a meaningful work, an important work that contributes to the duration of time, I think we should learn to say no more often to say no to that which is superfluous and saying no to that. Really, what we ' re doing is giving priority to what really matters. The idea is to lighten our workload to have plenty of time, to focus and delve into a few things, things that are really important. And for this we must classify tasks into compromises and distractions. So when you' re invited to a meeting, you have to think if it' s an engagement or if it' s a distraction. And if it' s a distraction, obviously, rejecting

8:48 it and not going to have fewer chores throughout your day doesn' t mean you' re less productive. It means that you have the chance to do those tasks better than you will be able to pay each of them the attention they deserve. So, the only tasks that you should accept, I think, are those that connect directly with the objectives that you have, the objectives that you should always have clear at the beginning of each year in all aspects of your life, not just at work. You have to have goals for your health, you have to have goals for your relationships, you have to have economic goals and you have to have professional goals as well. And the second derivative is to take enough time to complete those tasks. I think so, the great minds of history, the inventors, the scientists, the painters, see how we work today. I think they died again because we live in an unceasing cycle of activity. We have bosses, we have clients who are constantly controlling our process and then free time, leisure. It seems that it is relegated to the background, it seems that everything is for yesterday.

10:09 But if we think of great minds and think of copernicus, for example, we realize that he spent almost fifteen years perfecting his ideas about the movement of planets before going and sharing them with the world. And besides, it is known that he was a great lover of the time of Leisure, that he loved the theater, that he loved the music. And it' s not the only example. If we go to Isaac Newton for example, then we see that his theory of gravity took more than two decades to publish. What this tells us is that patience that perseverance is essential to create things that are worthwhile and that can last in time. But to create like these geniuses we have to set a rhythm, and a rhythm includes for, because normally it is in those pauses that the best ideas are to be born. So what I' m proposing is that, instead of just focusing on what you can get in a day or what you can get in a quarter. I propose that you work with longer time periods, for example, five years. Make yourself a five- year plan, a five- year plan. What allows you to do is to set a pace of work, and that pace of work as it is so long, because it can include pauses that I have already told you that is where, in those pauses where the best ideas are born. In that rhythm you will have more active seasons and inactivity seasons where you will also have the opportunity to rest. In the end, it'

11:43 s about protecting the quality of your work above the quantity. You have to be obsessed with the quality of your work. A good novel doesn' t write the same way you run a speed race. It' s not a sprint. It is a gradual process that takes a lot of time. It requires working, every nuance every character, looking for inspiration in many places, talking to other writers, reading a lot, and that you can' t do in a few days. You can' t have a task of writing a novel in an impossible month. It' s probably a job of years or many months, that you have to organize in a sustainable way, making an investment in yourself and with a normal job it' s exactly the same.

12:31 You have to take the best of professions that really produce important things and things that are left for posterity and apply them to your own work. So you know, the contemporary concept of productivity leaves today' s workers burned by a lot of meaningless tasks and by a rhythm that is unnecessarily frenzied. To create meaningful work, meaning quality work, we have to adopt a slower productivity model, a model that says no to activity, by the activity that allows us to work at a more natural pace. We need to shift the focus from quantity to charity. If you liked this episode, please like to share on social networks or visit three WWS. Fucking and ideas for a better life.

13:31 Point com there you can subscribe and download completely free a copy of my latest book, Seven steps for a life with purpose and if you want to learn much more and train in personal development with the best experts. Check out the free master' s degree of personal development online from ipp TE. I leave your link in the episode notes. Down there, next to my books, and I' m just saying goodbye. Thank you very much, as always and until the next