Top Five Takeaways from 2021
It has been almost a full year since I officially started my own business. In a little over 12 months, I have looked more closely into topics like goal-setting, organizing time and schedules, and managing relationships - both good and bad - with productivity. As a coach and a teacher, I strive to model the concepts I learn in positive ways.
I started my journey as a solopreneur in July of 2020 just after the COVID-19 pandemic had essentially put us into lockdown. I took some time to look into how to start a residential organizing business, and I thought that by September or October I would be able to get back out into the community. For several reasons - health, safety, family, and miscellaneous other circumstances - I decided to shift my focus. Instead of residential organizing, I started to coach people on how to organize their time, tasks and priorities. I wanted to help people find clarity and order in their daily lives. In looking at my own reasons for wanting to help others get things done, I also realized that my mission was to ensure people have time for what really matters in their lives.
Throughout the year I have been talking to professionals in my field, clients, friends and family. They have all said that they would like more time in their life. That has been reassuring because part of what I want to do is help people manage their time, but this has also been very thought provoking from a cultural and societal perspective. It has pushed me to dive deeper into the research and examine why so many of us are looking for more time - especially to do the things we care about and value.
I don’t think I will ever stop learning, and I look forward to building my knowledge base on the topic of our relationship with time. I want to continue to understand more about our thoughts, behaviors, and feelings around how we organize our time.
For now, I would like to share with you my top five takeaways from 2021:
1 - Goal-setting is beneficial because it gives us direction, but refining our systems will ultimately help us make progress.
My thoughts about goal-setting have shifted a bit over this past year. I am now more of the mindset that goals are something we can still set, but in reality, we should always be working toward something bigger than just an end point. We should be focusing on our systems and methods so that we can think about progress as a continuous process.
James Clear states in his book Atomic Habits: “Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.”
2 - Hustle culture is not healthy, and we need to get away from the notion that we always have to be working to be successful.
I have taken a whole new look at what it means to be productive and how people view productivity in their lives whether it is inside or outside the workplace.
We live in a culture that has put a lot of emphasis on “being productive,” which has in turn led to a way of life that makes people think that if they work more they will reap more benefits - some refer to this as hustle culture. This has led to burnout and lack of a healthy balance when it comes to managing time between work, personal time, family time, rest, etc.
When I mention the word productivity, it can evoke feelings of stress and anxiety for some people. The reason I want to help people with organizing time and tasks is to DECREASE stress and manage feelings of being overwhelmed. I want to make things more efficient in life so people can enjoy more of what matters to them. Despite my best intentions, the words “productivity” and “efficiency” make me think twice about how I use my words, what I mean by my mission, and in how I approach conversations around what I do.
3 - Time is a complicated concept, but we can learn to align the use of our time with our values.
I now have a new perspective about how closely we should align the use of our time with our values. We need to understand what is important to us and what isn’t so that we can use our time wisely.
There are so many intertwined disciplines that drive our awareness around connections to the way we use time - economics, social science, psychology, neuroscience, etc. All of those disciplines examine some aspect of why we do the things we do with the time we have.
I like to talk about list-making, routines, and structure as ways to relieve stress and free time in our lives. These tools ensure our brain has the capacity to think about more important things and our bodies have more energy to enjoy the things we value.
4 - Success and progress should be defined on an individual basis.
Along the same lines of goal-setting, I have started to re-evaluate what success means. How do we find happiness and a sense of accomplishment in a world where we are bombarded with so many ideas about what we “should” be doing and what “success” is supposed to look like? How do we find that ultimate state of satisfaction?
Early in 2021 I wrote a piece about what personal productivity means to us as individuals. I should have been talking more about how we define success or progress.
What motivates you may not motivate the next person. Success to you is different from the success of your neighbor. This is such a personal topic, and I think that I have a lot to explore in terms of how to approach it, especially when we talk about aligning values and measures of success. Time, getting things done, and our ideas around reaching successful outcomes are clearly very interconnected.
5 - Having boundaries and taking breaks can actually increase productivity.
The pandemic has revealed new ways we think about boundaries - in all facets of our lives. For some people, there are fewer boundaries between work life and home life. For others, the lines must be drawn very clearly. Regardless of where people stand, I have realized that we must embrace the idea that we need to set boundaries to ensure that we are maintaining a healthy balance between all of the things we do in the day.
Similar to setting boundaries, taking breaks can actually help us be more productive. We need to rest our brains, and we need to rejuvenate our bodies so that we can thrive. I touched on the topic of blocking time for self-care this past year, but boundaries, breaks, and the concept of making time for rest is something that needs more attention in the new year!
I am looking forward to exploring more in 2022!
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