There is a distinction between the habit of being productive and being busy —

Being busy is activity-based execution with no direction.
Being productive means executing the activities that bring you closer to the experience of personal and professional fulfillment.

Busy-ness diminishes your well-being, while true productivity enriches you from the inside out. At Valence Advisory, we've put together a simple 5-point strategic productivity cycle that will help you:

Focus on the work you find rewarding and enjoyable.
Lead, manage, and support reports, helping them develop a stronger immune response to ‘productivity theater.’
Feel clearer, more confident, and in control.

What we share isn’t entirely new— we have sourced knowledge from many colleagues, mentors, and advisors over the years, applied them to our businesses and careers, made adjustments, and clarified some key distinctions based on our experiences.

Furthermore, we appreciate that mental models and frames are ultimately guidelines, not prescriptions. In practice, there will always be some inefficiencies, especially within the constraints of time, capital, energy, and the ‘unknown.’ However, our intention is to provide a scaffold to support personal growth and productivity, one you can adapt to suit your unique situation.

The productivity cycle process is quite simple—take note of all the tasks and activities you believe you must get done and run them through this:

Define It.
Do it yourself right now.
Date it for another time.
Delegate it.
Dump it.

The 5 points of the cycle are essential components—intertwined like a tensegrity structure—they are all equally as important and work together. Let's explore each of these 5 points in more detail:

Define It

To appreciate the significance of this component, we are going to talk about a few essentials:

The human brain.
Why it is important to define a true north.
How to start defining your true north.

By the time you finish reading this section, it will be apparent to you how the three connect.

1) Your True North

If you are walking across a road during peak hour traffic— no dedicated crossings— where would your attention be? Most of your attention would be on avoiding traffic. If it is your first time doing this, your heart rate will spike, your palms sweat, and your mind on hyper-alert.

Now, in this hyper-alert state, try to make intelligent, strategic decisions about your life and business — you won’t be able to do so effectively. Because you are in a state of fight, flight, freeze, you can’t access higher executive functions in your brain that deal with strategy, goals, and decision-making.

This isn’t a different experience to having way too much to do in a minimal amount of time. And, if we are frequently in an adrenalized state — we get exhausted, our life-force diminishes, and we rely on more stimulants to keep us going.

So, what does defining your true north have to do with anything?

First, we need to get out of that adrenalized state to better utilize higher functions in our brain. To understand the significance of this, we would love to share some information about one of the components of the human brain — the prefrontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex is a bit of brain tissue that sits right behind your forehead and is responsible for executive function: acquiring knowledge, planning complex cognitive behavior, decision-making, personality expression.

Try this out: lift your left palm, place it on your forehead, and breathe a few breaths in and out — you’ll notice how nice this feels.

The prefrontal cortex is the seat of a higher, more resourceful and creative intelligence — you want to access this part of your brain more frequently. However, when you experience excessive fear, stress, anxiety, and overwhelm — you inhibit your prefrontal cortex function. But when you define, clarity, and continually refine your true north — your personal purpose — you increase the frequency of use of your prefrontal cortex and its higher function.

The more you access your purpose and vision, the easier it is for you to stay in the executive seat. When you have a true north, rather than feeling flustered, you will be able to strategize and make better decisions intelligently. Here are some simple questions that can help you define and clarify your truth north:

What would you like to see more of in the world?
What about the current world, if any, concerns you deeply?
What is a cause or vision that you would like to make a reality, whether you were paid to do so or not?
If you knew you couldn’t fail at anything, what would you pursue?
What things do you do so well and so naturally, but don’t consider special?
If you didn’t need permission from anyone or anything, what might you do with your life?

Answering the above questions requires some soul searching to develop deeper levels of self-awareness. Clarifying, defining, and redefining your true north is a skill for life. Over time, your true north will help you confidently say ‘no’ to the things that distract you from what’s most important, and ‘yes’ to the things that are important. Furthermore, it is our observation that your personal purpose is a unique expression of your highest core values.

Core values are representations—things, activities, interactions, and subject-matters— that we deem to be most important in our lives. Our hierarchy of values— most important to least important— determines what we filter for in life, and more importantly, what we use to govern our decision-making processes.

Your natural behaviors demonstrates your values. To clarify your values, audit your external environment (behaviors in context) and your internal landscape (thoughts and emotions) without judgment— a pattern will reveal itself. You can download this simple questionnaire— it will help you clarify your core values. As you clarify your core values, you will notice that you are already living a purposeful life. And, there is always an opportunity to become more aware of what is important to you, and refine your expression of your personal purpose.

Summing this section up: start with some idea of your true north, clarify your core values, and continue from there. Your purpose will become clearer and clearer with practice and time.

2) Chunking Down

Try sifting iron filings from sand if they are clumped together, forming dense clusters of iron. Unless your magnet is powerful, you won't be able to overcome the force of gravity on the big clumps and therefore fail to lift them out of the sand pit. You need to break the clumps into small pieces by perforating the iron filings and sand mix.

The same principle applies to chunking work activities down. If you don’t chunk down your activities into bite-sizes, you run the risk of trying to lift too much at once— underestimating the time and effort required to complete a particular activity.

Let’s suppose you have prescribed an activity— “find publications to feature your startup.” In this example, the activity is not chunked down sufficiently because multiple activities need to be done:

Find 3 publications to feature your writings.
Secure contacts to reach out to, either through your first degree or second degree networks.
Craft copy to pitch your writing and answer two questions; 1) Why them? 2) Why you?
Use the copy to reach out to your network and request for 3 warm referrals to the decision-making editors of these publications.

How do you know if the activity is sufficiently chunked down? Ensure you can do these activities within an arm’s reach wherever you are. Look at the above mentioned activities, and you will notice that if you have a phone, computer, and WiFi, you can do them right away— the resources to do so are within arm’s reach— you don’t need to walk to a park or get on a ferry for example.

3) Can You Initiate and Maintain the Activity Yourself?

What's more easeful: attempting to control and influence everyone and everything in the world so that the world is as you will it? Or, controlling how you respond to the world around you and making conscious choices about you? The latter is less energy consuming and much more empowering.

However, as human beings, we are famous for worrying about stuff we can't control. A simple example of this— whether someone invests in your business (or not) is not up to you. You can do your best to present it in the most informative and engaging light. But whether investors invests in your company (or not) is up to them, not you.

So, pitching your business to investors can be initiated and maintained by yourself. However, the investor’s decision to buy (or not) cannot be initiated and maintained by you. You can influence investors, but you can't decide for them. We find it useful to assume you can't control everything that happens in the world. You can, however, control how you respond.

List your activities and run them through the following questions in sequence:

Which of those activities can you initiate and maintain yourself, and how specifically can you go about doing that?
Which of those activities can you influence but not necessarily initiate and maintain yourself?
Which of those activities do you absolutely have no control over?

Do It Yourself

If your activity is clearly defined, linked to your true north, appropriately chunked down, and initiated and maintained by yourself—you’ve created paths of least resistance to do what you value most. This doesn’t mean things will be easy walks in the park— but it means you will be inspired from within to face and address those challenges. Here are some ways you can confirm this:

You feel inspired by the activity and intrinsically compelled to execute it.
When you complete an activity, you feel more energized from within instead of diminished.
When you are in the company of others, you are excited to talk about the activities you are doing, and you magnetize others towards your cause.

Like any object that has been put in motion—if there is minimal resistance, it will gather speed and force. However, what if you end up with lots of activities that you love, and they all serve your true north? Let’s discuss how to serialize your activities in the next section.

Date It

Write down the word ‘serialization’ on paper. To do this, most of us would start from left to right and scribble out the letters S-E-R-I-A-L-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N in order.

For most of us, we could probably write the word ‘serialization’ in about 5 seconds or less without much conscious effort or attention.

Now, try writing the word serialization by hand, but fill out the letters in random order—right-to-left and left-to-right—until all the letters are on the page.

Most of us would take 20 seconds or more to do so. We would eventually end up with the word written on paper, but it’ll take much longer and would involve much more effort.

What we illustrated applies when you are prioritizing your activities and tasks too. If your tasks are dated and serialized, they have a higher probability of getting done faster and with greater ease.

Our brains have functions that are great at planning and serialization. If you give your brain a specific date, your brain's organizing faculties can start managing and prioritizing how it distributes its processing power.

In contrast, if you don't serialize your activities, if you need to do everything on your to-do list but don't know when specifically they should be done by—it won’t take long for your mental bandwidth to max out— it’ll feel like having slow, spotty wifi.

When you date and prioritize your activities, your conscious attention is freed to focus on the activity at hand. Cognitive Psychology George Miller has a law named after him—Miller’s Law. Miller’s Law prescribes the limits on our capacity to process information using our conscious attention. We can at any time, consciously focus on 5-9 bits of information. That’s why it is easier to remember phone numbers when they are structured in 3 chunks such as:

(415) 240-1435

Compare the ease of processing the above 3 chunks to processing these 10 chunks:

4152401435

We discussed chunking things down earlier in this article—the step of dating and serializing your activities assists to chunk things down too— it is a form of chunking down and across time. When you date an activity, it frees up your conscious "chunks" so you can focus on the activities at hand. Let me give you another example by writing a list of activities to do:

Negotiate new sales deals with client X.
Write and send 3 x request for investor introductions.
Respond to 10 x inbound sales inquiries.
Lunch with a potential investor.
Check-in and provide content to marketing lead.
Report sales numbers to co-founder.
Draft 1 new content marketing piece.
Interview new hire.

Now, we are going to write the list of ‘to-dos’ in order of when they need to be done:

Interview new hire: 9 am - 9:30 am
Negotiate new sales deals with client X: 10:00 am - 10:30 am today
Respond to 10 x inbound sales inquiries: 10:30 am - 11:30 pm
Lunch with a potential investor: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Draft 1 new content marketing piece: 2 pm - 3:00 pm today
Check-in and provide content to marketing lead: 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Report sales numbers to co-founder: 4:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Write and send 3 x request for investor introductions: 4:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Place this in a planner (we recommend using calendars), and it looks like this:

Imagine you are to carry out the activities we just listed— notice what your experience is when the activities are dated, time-stamped, and serialized versus just being listed in any order.

When you date and serialize activities properly, your nervous system will initiate what is called a parasympathetic reset—an inhale and an exhale. Give your activities a place in time— you will feel clearer, more confident, and in control.

Delegate It

Have you ever heard of Lynne Cox? Lynne is an American long-distance open-swimmer and author Swimming to Antarctica. Lynne was the first person to swim between the United States and the Soviet Union, in the Bering Strait— it was a feat which has been recognized for easing Cold War tensions, but more importantly, a story about the triumph of the human spirit.

Lynne didn’t achieve greatness alone—she built a team around her; expert scientists, spotters, coaches, seafarers, press, corporate sponsors, and even dolphins. If she had to do everything herself, she wouldn’t be so great at what she loved doing and what came naturally to her—swimming in open water for extended periods and covering distances in record time.

Performance is a team sport. We need to delegate activities to others— to maximize joy in what you do, you want to focus more on the activities you enjoy, the activities that you have a natural talent for, and minimize activities you aren't so good at. This doesn't mean you won't have to complete activities you don’t enjoy— there are activities that are natural necessities in life and work. The point is to focus most of your efforts and attention to the areas of your highest value.

Example: we do not love procuring or reading legal documentation, nor do we get excited about consolidating our accounts for tax purposes. But someone (e.g., an accountant) or something (e.g., Quickbooks software) can help us get those things done with ease— we delegate these tasks to the right people and technologies. But you might be wondering:

How do you know if it is worth paying someone or not?
What if you can’t hire someone?
What if you can’t afford a piece of software?

Here are three ways you can still delegate what you need:

Pay to get it done.
Barter to get it done.
A combination of 1) Pay and 2) Barter.

1) Pay to Get it Done

First, pay someone to help you get it done. The microeconomic theory at play here is called opportunity cost— the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.

Example: if you ask us to reconcile our business accounts, it will take us hours (if not days) to do it, and chances are we'll still end up doing a very poor job. We could be using that time on more productive activities that earn us $2000/hour. Now, to get a professional to reconcile your accounts could cost us anywhere between $75 - $125/hour.

But what about more complex activities? How do you effectively and efficiently delegate activities if you are managing numerous staff, contractors, and partnerships? This is where the other productivity cycle elements come into play:

Define it.
Delegate.
Date it.

If you know what needs to get done and by when— defined and dated— you can find who or what should do them. Some of those activities you will do yourself, and others you will assign to other people or even technologies. When assigning activities and accountabilities to other people, answer these questions in sequence:

Who would consider this activity fun?
Who would be a natural at completing these tasks?
What expectation—workflow, timeliness, and quality—do you need to set so both parties are clear?
What (if any) information, resources, and mentoring do they need to get it done?

When delegating, we don’t always select someone based on proven experience— we also look at their natural talents, ask them what their personal and professional goals are, and communicate the activity in a way that helps them fulfill it.

Delegating is skillset that takes time to develop. It isn’t something you learn overnight. When you get started, you will likely delegate poorly and to the wrong person. However, it is worth taking manageable risks to learn. If you find the right person to delegate to effectively, the upside is tremendous.

These are some good indicators that your delegation efforts are working: 1) Reports feel inspired and enriched to help me out which builds good will, 2) Reports complete the activity effectively and on time (often ahead of time), and 3) You don’t feel compelled to micromanage or micro-monitor their efforts.

When we share this methodology with people we collaborate with—we all get better at saying ‘No’ to the things we shouldn't be doing and ‘Yes' to the things we should. And, team members have permission to say "No" without fear they might be perceived as lazy, unmotivated, or not doing enough work— this helps minimize ‘productivity theater.’Just like a game of professional soccer—you have a striker, mid-fielders, goalkeepers—everyone has specialized positions and understands where they add the most value and how they support each team member. Nobody complains if the striker isn’t doing the goalkeeping or if the goalkeeper isn’t scoring goals.

Second, embrace technology— many redundant administrative and repetitive activities have been automated by software. Give you an example:

Otter can help you create a professionally transcripted document of your audio recording, interview, podcast, or video recording.
QuickBooks has an app that you can use to take a photo of your receipts and have them automatically tallied as expenses.
Slack is an app that helps you manage all your team communications in one single fast, easy-to-use mobile or desktop app.
Asana is a project management tool for teams to collaborate, stay on task and stay on track.

The list goes on. Think of any activity that you would love to have automated and likely, there is an app for it.

2) Barter

Barter is a system of exchange where participants in a transaction directly exchange goods or services for other products or services without using money as a medium of exchange.

The principle is simple— both parties perceive to gain more value for what they provide the other party. Suppose you are the CEO of a company that offers an app that helps people manage their networks— affinity.co is one such app.

You might find a market network influencer and offer him or her a complimentary subscription to your product. In exchange, you get access to their contacts, and you get to leverage their networks to build your brand without having to establish relationships from scratch. In exchange, they get to enjoy the benefits of managing and nurturing their networks using your app. This is a high-leverage exchange for both parties— they get access to a product they don't have to pay for, and you get to leverage their networks to build your brand without having to establish and nurture quality relationships from scratch.

3) Combination of Pay and Barter

Pay for part of the service and offer something else to pay for the deficit. This can take on numerous forms. You must assess the opportunities case-by-case and you can get creative as you want. The principle stays the same—structure the deal in a way that both parties perceive gaining more than what they are required to give.

Dump It

If you have filtered your list of activities through the previous steps of this 5-point productivity cycle, and it still doesn't belong anywhere—you are ready to dump it. But before you dump it, this point of the cycle provides you with an excellent opportunity to reflect and learn about your underlying operating assumptions (rules).

When you get to this point in the productivity cycle, you might realize you have a lot less to do than you originally thought. Often, activities we think we ‘must’ do, ‘should’ do, ‘need’ to do, or ‘ought’ to do—aren’t rational. In linguistic-land, these are called modal operators of necessity and represent rules we assign for our lives. By paying close attention to what our rules are, we can reveal our unconscious operating assumptions and beliefs we inherited from the people, places, activities, and events we grew up with.

Example: suppose someone believes they must work for themselves and run their own business to have more time freedom and flexibility. They might miss out on another possibility: you can find great companies to work for and with—companies that have great flexible working arrangements.

The best way to identify the limits of your perception is to look at the activities that you are about to dump— identify the ones that you thought you ‘must’ do, ‘should’ do, ‘supposed’ to do, ‘need’ to, and ‘ought’ to do—run those activities through these set of questions in sequence:

What did you think would happen if you didn’t do it?
Observe your response to (1) and ask yourself, “What lets you know this is true?”
Observe your response and ask yourself, “What can you do to confirm or disprove your hypothesis?”

We believe these 3 steps are great for developing self-awareness, re-assessing your assumptions, and personally growing your approach to work and life.

In Summary

There is a distinction between the habit of being productive: being busy is activity-based execution with no direction, and being productive means executing the activities that bring you closer to the experience of personal and professional fulfillment.
Psychological safety is underrated: to better utilize higher functions in our brain (prefrontal cortex), we need to feel safe, calm, and in control. The prefrontal cortex is a bit of brain tissue that sits right behind your forehead and is responsible for executive function: acquiring knowledge, planning complex cognitive behavior, decision-making, personality expression.
Clarifying, defining, and redefining your true north is a skill for life: it doesn’t happen overnight, but, over time, it helps you confidently say ‘no’ to the things that distract you from fulfilling what’s most important to you.
Mental models and frames are ultimately guides, not prescriptions: in practice, there will always be some inefficiencies, especially within the constraints of time, capital, energy, and the “unknown.” However, it is helpful to have scaffold to support your growth and productivity— you can personalize and adapt them to suit your unique situation.
For every activity you dread or drag your feet at, there is someone (or something) who considers it play. Delegating is skillset that takes time to develop. It isn’t something you learn overnight. When you get started, you will likely delegate poorly and to the wrong person. However, it is worth taking manageable risks to learn.