SuperCompetent: The Six Keys to Perform at Your Productive Best

SUMMARY: ACTIVITY

Productivity requires propulsion. You're never going to be productive if you sit like a lump and don't get to work. Think of all those failure-to-launch kids who seem to plague modern society. These boomerang children come back home and live in their parents' basements because they can't get a career started. Why? Well, let's leave the underlying reasons to the sociologists to ponder and simply be frank: For whatever reason, they've lost track of Key 1: There's no Activity in their work lives, so there's no real work life.

Even those of us out in the rat race every day may be sabotaging ourselves by failing to put Activity into play properly. Super-Competent people know that value does not equal velocity; you can be busy all day long, running from one brushfire to another, without accomplishing anything productive at all. True Activity has a purpose that gives you a sense of direction. It's all about knowing your goals and working toward them in a constructive manner. It's also about not being hidebound by the old ways of doing things if it's possible to do something more efficiently. This is critical, because nothing gets in the way of getting things done like useless dinosaur thinking.

Incidentally, just because you find a process that streamlines your overfilled schedule—whether it involves taming your to-do list by doing the hard things first, abandoning useless tasks, or learning quicker ways to do things—don't assume that means you can now fit a whole new task ...