How to Learn a Productivity System Part 6: Making it Work

Is your work enjoyable?

If it is, then you might be more amenable to call everything you do at home and at the office work.  If not, let’s reframe for a second.

Work = Effort toward a Goal

If the equation holds true, then what you do at home (home maintenance, vacations, personal finance, raising kids, plans of the future, health fitness and hobbies) is also WORK.

What’s interesting about calling all of our life activity ‘work’ is the sense that work is something that you do with purpose.  You want a result for your effort.

The business mind is focused on achieving the business goals, the revenue, the growth, and the sustainability of business.  

The personal mind is focused on seeing how to prepare kids for life in the future, enjoying a vacation, re-training for another career, reducing the stress in life, spending more time with your spouse, changing ingrained habits or starting on a bucket list item.

The business mind has a natural craving to design and execute goals. The rewards are very tactile.  When you do a good job for a customer you might get a thank you, and of course you get paid.  

For salaried folks, you might not see the transaction so vividly, but we want to get the project or tasks done and often we are measured during the year for achieving specific goals.  Achieving goals results in a better review and potential earnings growth, maybe a promotion with more scope.

The personal mind requires a lot more proactive behavior to create the goal.  Personal goals are not laid out by the leadership of the business, they are created through personal leadership.



For specific steps on how to employ personal leadership see the prior articles on “How to Learn a Productivity System.”  Part 3, 4, and 5 are focused almost completely on personal leadership.  Parts 1 and 2 are focused on tactical ways that you can create time in your day so you can spend more hours doing the strategic tasks needed to increase your personal leadership.

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 1: Capture

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 2: Actions

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 3: Planning

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 4: Goals

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 5: Evaluate Life Dreams

Which is more important, business mind or personal mind?

That is a tough question.

The business mind provides the How-the monetary sustenance.  

The personal mind provides the Why-the Character and the Motivations.

The answer: They are both important.  They both impact each other.  

A personal example of interleaving the personal and business mind

In 2005 I took a role as a “Team Lead/Scrum Master.” My leadership style was centered around high volume and persuasive intimidation.

In 2008, I was promoted to department manager and I WAS SCARED SPIT-LESS. I had engaged in numerous technical and political battles with my peers over the years, and now I was taking over leadership of a team that knew my reputation as loud, overbearing, manipulative person. I had created animosity with a couple of the most senior and respected individuals by forceful getting my way using pushy tactics.

Answering the wakeup call

Faced with managing a team that saw me as an antagonist rather than a helpful resource, I realized I needed to drastically alter course.

In the months and years that followed my promotion, I studied hard to change my mindset and my behaviors (and I still study hard to this day). I read book after book and listened to people in the organization that showed management skills coincident with what I was learning about effective personal and public leadership. I moved my personal style from directive-authoritative to servant-leader.

This personal study to improve character created a deep well of good behaviors and resulted in better quality of life in both my personal sphere and in the business arena.

People in my organizations gave me feedback that they had grown to respect me over time as I demonstrated consistent other-centered leadership.

Personal leadership has a broad impact

Isn’t it interesting that the personal mind has such a great impact everywhere?  It might be the more important mind after all.

The moral of the story is this: No matter if it’s personal or business it’s WORK.  And if it’s work, it needs a system to move toward the goal. 

One of my favorite authors, David Allen, has a great book on this very topic called, Making it All Work.  He provides an entire book dedicated to creating a unified productivity mindset around personal and business goals. David Allen’s previous book, Getting Things Done describes a comprehensive productivity system which is now known globally as GTD.

What is not working in your personal or business system?  Write a comment or send me an e-mail and let me know? 

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 5: Evaluate Life Dreams

When we think about productivity, we might think about being busy. That is an inaccurate view of productivity.

Productivity is achieving the most important things in life while avoiding the pitfalls of busy work and unproductive meaningless time wasting endeavors.





So if you’re not yet keenly aware of the most important things, then that’s a very good place start. If you’re already aware of the most important things, then it’s good to revisit them to make sure you continue to move in the right direction.


Identifying the most important things


The following two exercises will help you identify some of your core desires in life. These exercises strip away things that are just about prestige and outward appearance.  

Yes, I want to own a Porsche 911, but it actually doesn’t appear on the core list of what I want to achieve during my living years. A Porsche cannot help me leave a legacy so it is not on the ‘got-to-have’ list.

Give these two exercises a try for building your core desires. If you already have a most important list, is it time to revisit it? Compare these exercise results to your existing list. Are there any differences? 

Why do you think some things made the list and others didn’t?

Time Travel to Your 80th Birthday

Envision your 80th birthday party. In this self-created visualization consider the location, the people, and the conversations you’ll have with those attending the party. You might need to close your eyes.

For me, I placed my 80th birthday party in my backyard and visualized my wife, my daughters, my grand-kids, my extended family, and my friends. I thought about my own character and legacy and the character of my children and grandchildren. 

Another addition to the exercise would be to visualize your professional accomplishments. It could be the successful sale of a business, the retirement from a company after attaining a certain leadership position, or perhaps the accomplishment of a significant goal that impacts the world.

In your visualization you can also think about:

• Things still on your bucket list
• Health goals
• Travel

These results are the core of why you want to be productive.


To discover the real dreams in your life requires considerable introspection.

Write down your thoughts on paper or in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Through the years I’ve added, removed or refined different aspects of it. Revisiting it annually moves me into a mindset where I can be more focused on the things that matter.

What Do They Say at Your Funeral?

In the exercise above, you envision a living legacy. You can see, hear, feel, and interact with your surroundings. This activity is a retrospective on your life.

There are several approaches you can take to talk about your non-living legacy.  

1.  Think about attending a funeral. It’s quiet and respectful. People are seated and someone is ready to speak at the front. But as you look into the coffin you realize this is your funeral. Consider who you would like to speak and what they would say.

2. Write your own obituary, but include more insightful things than just “survived by” and “lived at.” Go deep enough to bring out your legacy. What you want to leave after you pass on can be a serious guiding post to your core dreams.

Wow. That’s Different Than I Expected

There are some interesting things on my bucket list: trip to Italy, vacation in Tahiti, own a 1978 Porsche 911 Carrera RS, do an Olympic Distance Triathlon, watch the Formula One US Grand Prix Live, race a motorcycle, and many others.

In contrast, the two exercises resulted in things like “Happy, healthy, and wise children and grandchildren” or “a solid contribution in the market of productivity services that saved people millions of minutes over their lifetime.”

Evaluating your legacy gives a clue as to what dreams are truly the most valuable to you.  
Stephen Covey’s 2nd Habit in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is to “Know the End from the Beginning.” It’s a fancy way of saying do some planning.

When it comes to identifying your legacy, you’re doing meta planning. That’s effectively asking yourself what matters most and then providing a good solid answer.

The Core is Ready, Now What?

Once you’ve come up with a high, tactile version of your living and non-living legacies you’re ready to address the parts that make the dream happen.

Dreams can be hard to break down into parts because achieving dreams seems impossible. Dreaming doesn’t take any special effort or discipline, but reaching your dreams requires you to decompose the dream into small bite size chucks. For some concrete steps in breaking down dreams into goals and goals into plans, see the previous article, “How to Learn a Productivity System Part 4: Goals.” 

What About My Bucket List?

Don’t throw away your bucket list. Just know how it fits into the priority of things that matter most. 

For example, I had the dream of running a marathon. It was about 5 years of small steps that finally took me to the end goal in 2014. This happened to align with my desire to lead a healthy, fit life, so it didn’t take me in the opposite direction of my core dreams.

Please write a comment about what you discovered while doing these exercises. Did anything surprise you?

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 4: Goals

My kids have awesome dreams for the future. 

One of my kids wants to be a movie producer. One wants to be a famous actor. One wants to travel the world.

For myself, I still dream of being a race car drive (Yes, it’s true I still this dream even as a middle age person). 
These are examples of dreams and dreams can come true.  However, inorder to make a dream a reality, it must be decomposed into a goal.

Dreams cost you very little energy and time.  You can spend 5 minutes envisioning yourself crossing the finish line of a marathon or making decisions as the head of your own company or seeing yourself on the beach with your family in Hawaii or leading a large community of people to serve others or heading up significant a social change in your country or seeing your children live with integrity and principles.

And now the hard parts begins.  

Goals on the other hand, require much more than 5 minutes to write down.  And then they require much more energy and time to achieve once you’ve really put them down on paper and committed yourself to achieve the goal.
Some people have the capacity to keep all their most important dreams and goals totally encapsulated in their heads and then connect those to action. Those people are very rare. 

Most people need to take deliberate action to translate dreams into well written goals and then decompose goals into specific action steps.

Simple Dreams and Goals

Dream: “I want to have more energy and less stress.”

This is a great ambition.

What gives a person more energy?

Studies show energy is rooted in good habits around sleeping, eating, drinking water, exercise and good mental health.

In fact, there is a study showing that active people have about 20% more energy. If that is true, then we can decompose a dream of having more energy into a goal about being active.

Goal (Weak): “I want to exercise so I can have more energy.”

The weak goal above has a couple elements to help a person move toward more energy, but it lacks some critical elements.  The strong goal below includes the extra elements that remove the ambiguity about the frequency of exercise and the duration of exercise which are required ingredients to improve your chances for success.

Goal (Strong): “I want to exercise for 20 minutes, at least 3 times per week and do that consistently throughout 2016.”

This is much better and and more potent goal that has the potential to start a good habit.

Breaking that down further results in a plan of action which I talk about in the article, “How to Learn a Productivity System Part 3: Plan”

We’ll create a specific plan for this goal of exercising which should put us on the road to 
achieving the dream of “having more energy.”

The Plan:  “I will do (yoga, a walk, a run) for 20 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, Friday right after I get up at 6:00 am.”

More Complicated Dreams and Goals

Dream: “I want to be a CEO of my own company”

Interestingly, I’ve had this dream myself for many years. And as I looked around at the big company I was working for, I was overwhelmed with immense obstacles that seemed to bar the way:  I don’t have an MBA. I didn’t attend Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. I’ve never started my own company before.  

WAIT a minute.  “I’ve never started my own company before.”  What am I thinking?  Starting my own company for the first time automatically makes me a CEO. Right?

After some contemplation I became aware that I didn’t really know what my company would do or what it would sell or what type of service it would provide.
So that dream was a little narcissistic in that I didn’t really have any purpose or obvious value to offer. It was more a ‘dream’ fueled by the desire for prestige.

To build a sustainable dream, you must insist on offering value.  And you might argue that I’m wandering into the gray area of the philosophy of what makes a good dream vs. a bad dream. And you would be right. I think there are principles which should be followed when deciding about which dreams to chase vs. curtain.

Here a restatement of the original dream, but this rendition has a value statement.

Dream: “I want to lead a company which helps individuals and business maximize their productivity.” 

This dream has more tangle value statement and can more easily be generate goals and plans.

Goal (Weak): “Create a business to help people be more productivity”

This goal makes sense in that it provides a more focused idea (creating a business), but the weak goal lacks a time frame in which to execute the business activity, which will enable procrastination rather than accountability.

Goal (Strong): “Have a profitable business that serves productivity minded individuals by 31 Dec 2016.”

The strong goal will provide the qualifiers and deadline that make a idea into a GOAL.The Strong version also provides the necessary ingredients that make up a ’SMART’ goal: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.  

Let’s examine whether or not this goals passes the SMART test:

Specific - There appears to be pretty specific outcome to this goal which is a ‘profitable business’ that serves a ‘productivity minded’ market group.  The term ‘Specific’ is probably one of the gray areas to the ‘SMART’ goal definitions because the definition of ‘Specific’ can be broadly interrupted. However, the strong goal appears to meet this criteria.

Measurable - The word ‘profitable’ is a little loose with respect to measurement.  Does this mean profitable over the whole year or profitable for one month or profitable since the dawn on time. This actually needs work. Let’s propose that this be modified to say, ’…profitable for 1 month in 2016’.

Attainable - Depending on the expenses to run the business and the time allocated to running the business, this could be very attainable or it could be unachievable.  For the context of this goal, let’s assume the expenses are very low and the time commitment for the business is roughly 10 hours per week.  That sounds attainable.

Relevant - I think this hits a home run for relevant category because it flows directly from the Dream.

Timely - There is a deadline on the goal, so this is also spot on.

Takeaway for Dreams and Goals

When it comes to creating goals and plans, there is a cost equations.  
Dream-to-Plan Time = Size of Dream * Goals Creation Time * Plan Creation Time

Notice this is what we call an exponential equation.  That means if you have a big dream, you’ll need to put in big time.  Maybe not all at once, but definitely over the life of your dream.

Let’s consider another complex dream to illustrate the cost principle.

Dream: “I want to have children who live with integrity and principles.”   

You will probably need to spend time working on that dream every week. If you are a parent, you are probably already investing time in this area through many different activities and interaction with your kids. 

Below is one example goal that is decomposed from the dream.

Goal: “Provide daily personal input into children’s lives regarding life principles.”

Let’s break this down and see if it complies with the SMART goal format.

Specific - Very specific

Measurable - The measurement is to do this everyday. 

Attainable - Seems reasonable

Relevant - Very relevant toward the dream

Timely - This is a bit redundant with measurement in this case.  It’s a daily thing.

And then there is a plan that comes out of this.

Plan: “Read a quote or article or affirmation at breakfast that captures a life principles and briefly discuss.”

As a parent, you might say, “I do this as a course of everyday living.  I teach by example. I teach at every opportunity.”  And I think you are correct.  Keep up the good work. 

Sometimes it gives you a boost if you can do something very intentionally rather than in a reactionary situation.  Intentional situations are usually more relaxed and the child’s brain is ready to receive input.  In reactionary situations, such as teaching in the heat of the moment or when something went wrong, is often frustrating and much of the energy and training is waisted because the emotional situation constrains the brain and learning doesn’t happen well.

I really love to hear from you about the your biggest challenges setting goals.  What do you find the most difficult in goal setting?