Increase Productivity… “Play At Work” – “Work At Play”…
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which.“
Francois Rene de Chateaubriand
Action tip 6 goes hand in hand with a previous nugget I slipped in. Can you remember?
It was about NOT working yourself to an early grave. No one deserves those types of odds – it’s painful and ruins your life.
Listen up while I explain a day in the life of an average JOE!… (tell me if it sounds familiar)
Sitting down at the start of the day, you begin work… You’ll do maybe five or ten minutes of writing or planning, then head off to check your e-mails. Once you’re done, you remember a piece of music you heard on the TV and wonder what it is. So… you hop on over to Google and pump it into the search bar. Once you’re done, you go back to “work” and write another 10, fifteen, or twenty minutes.
There’s more…
Then you feel hungry, so you head to the kitchen and start cooking something to eat. Where you catch a glimpse of the TV or hear something on the radio that interests you. So you hang around to see what it’s all about for a few minutes…
When you’re done there, you head back to work for another fifteen minutes or so until your food is ready. Once it is, you head off, grab it, eat it, catch up on your TV program and relax a little while your food is digesting. (it’s tiring when you’ve just eaten, huh?) Then you tidy up and get “stuck into” another fifteen/twenty minutes of work.
By this time, you’re feeling the pinch, and it’s becoming a drag. You know you’ve been working hard all day (yet really… you haven’t).
In fact, you’ve only achieved a third or a quarter of the amount of work that could be done in that time. That’s a big difference (and your mind’s turned to spaghetti)
Let’s face it…
The transition from employee to employer is a BIG step. Especially if you’re doing both at the same time. You know… keeping hold of your day job while at the same time hoping to launch your own successful business.
When you’re so rushed and have barely time to think, it’s all too easy to forget to look at yourself and your achievements, or lack thereof.
But now that you’ve learned to “step back” and think about what it is you want to achieve. This scenario, which is all too familiar, won’t happen to you… will it?
The quote at the beginning of this post relates to what we’re talking about. He’s suggesting… we think of our work no differently than we do our playtime.
(funny that… but when I just wrote “playtime,” my mind zoomed straight back to “schooltime,” hmm)
Unless we’ve “learned” to separate work from play, it’s all going to be the same, isn’t it?
We expend energy all the same, although our perceptions of how we spend it are completely at odds.
Go take a lie down and think about what’s just been said. And when you finally “get it,” you won’t work another day in your life…
