There’s a very important lesson about productivity that it took me nearly a decade to learn.
It came after multiple rounds of getting a lot of stuff done, but still feeling like I wasn’t any better off. It seemed like I had done what needed doing. I had checked so many boxes, and crossed off so many items. I had things organized and categorized.
But I was still lacking…something.
Then it hit me: I was managing to get a lot of things done, but it was all kind of just…happening. It was more by chance and happenstance than by design. And while that can work here and there, it’s not what being productive is.
Productivity isn’t just about how much you get done, and how often. Being productive isn’t about crossing items off a list. It’s not necessarily about efficiency, either. Apps and robots are extremely efficient–more efficient than we humans could ever be.
Even if you become amazingly efficient, and you complete a lot of tasks quickly, even if you continue to take on more and get it done more quickly—you can still fail to be productive. There were times when I was getting a lot of stuff done, but deep down, I knew I wasn’t really being productive.
Being productive is really about being intentional.
Being productive means doing what you set out to do, and doing so consistently. It’s about following through from inception to completion–and not doing so merely by chance. It’s about living by your own design, day after day.
Which means ultimately, productivity comes down to making wise choices each day. It’s about consciously choosing the right goals, then choosing the right tasks to achieve those goals, and setting up your days around doing those tasks. That means getting increasingly better at allocating your scarce resources: time and energy.
That’s why it’s so important to find a system that helps you to become more intentional with those resources. And if you can’t find one, create one.
Sometimes, it can be enough just to better organize your work. For some people, organization alone can almost automatically make them better at being intentional. Other times–and this was true for me–that wasn’t enough. I could get really well organized for a while, but that’s as far as it went. I knew I had a lot of work, and where I could find it. But that didn’t push me to actually do it. Nor did it provide a framework for me to form better intentions about what I wanted to do and hold me accountable for following through.
That’s what the Today System is here for. It provides a way to set up each day intentionally, and it provides a way to easily see how intentional you were. The better your score, the more intentional you were with your day. The numbers don’t lie; they tell you whether you spent the day in the way you intended to.
The more consistently you earn high scores, the more trust you build in yourself. Your score tells you how much you can trust yourself to get done what you intend to. And building that trust is the single most important thing you can do to build confidence and personal strength. The more of that you have, the fewer things stand in your way.
