Working Hard and Getting Nowhere

Every company that I work with has some issue with perceived productivity — people working hard at things that add no value. It might be a team that’s lost direction or a culture that does things as they’ve always been done. It could a department who never evaluates the effectivenees of their process.

I suppose that comes from a misaligned perception that hard work is equal to a positive contribution. It’s not so. A positive contribution is any work that moves us closer to our goals — sometimes that’s hard work; sometimes it’s simple and elegant.

When we work at home, it’s easy to fall victim to the lure of productivity that gets us nowhere. We feel like we’re working. No one says our time investment isn’t worth it. In the past few months, people have said these things to me:

I’m all I can and in the last 6 months, I’ve only made $600.

I work 14 hours a day. I guess you need money to make money.

In my last job, I was a high performing VP. Now I can’t get a client to talk to me.

Every time I asked what they were doing. They answered with common wisdom about successful blogging.

• I spend hours writing high-quality blog posts.
• I spend hours writing comments and social networking.
• I tweak my blog to make it more inviting.

If you’ve got a blog, you know that it’s work to do all of that. It’s highly productive work, if the goal is to build a first-rate blog audience. But the folks who came to me had a goal to build a client-based business. They were working hard on some things that wouldn’t take them where wanted to be.

It was perceived productivity. Wisdom needs to match up wth where we’re going.

Each person took a minute to apply their goals to what they were doing. The wisdom matched to their goals made a new purpose and new direction. Every high-quality blog post and every hour spent networking and commenting was considered in light of their business. A slight shift made a big difference. Time spent became highly productive.

Wisdom + goals = direction, purpose, productivity

Ever been victim to perceived productivity?

I have. Now I keep my goal in front of me.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!