Three "Productivity" questions to ask yourself from time to time

I spent a good portion of Monday this week working remotely from a coffee shop in London.

During that time, I completed a weekly review, read one-quarter of the novel I’m enjoying (The Kite Runner), hand wrote a thank you card and processed my note-holder (medium-sized, lined paper Moleskine). During all of that getting-current activity, I realized there are THREE  Productivity questions I am interested in asking myself and my clients.

1) What do you hold yourself accountable to?
Change is the constant that we deal with, and when we make an agreement today, how do we follow through with it tomorrow? You and I live in a world where people will agree to do something for you, and then days or weeks later forget they said such a thing.

Our military clients have an acronym to explain this: OBE: Overcome By Events. When you tell someone you’ll do something for him or her, do they assume you will get it done? And, if it looks like you are running late on getting something done for yourself or someone else, how do you renegotiate that agreement?

2) What is it you think you need to be doing more (or less) of?
In those notes I wrote over the past few days while on phone calls, on the airplane, in my hotel room(s) and during meetings with clients, it is apparent I have more to do than I can do. (So do you, by the way.) I am appreciative of the thinking time I give myself to back up and see what I needed to see. Sometimes, we get caught up looking forward, trying to figure out where we need to be next, and what we should be doing. By getting as current as possible, it makes it easier for us to see what we need to be doing more of; and yes, what we need to be doing less of.

3) What are you NOT engaged in that is pulling your focus, distracting you, and making it difficult for you to get things done?
More than likely, if we as readers and writers share this quality, we are not doing something that we are thinking about doing. One of the quotes I use in seminars is:

Think about what you have to do, and do something you have thought about.

It’s important, every now and then to look at what you are NOT doing and change the way you are getting things done. I know that it is easy to understand that change changes things. What is not so easy to intuit is that the inevitability of change does not mean we will respond to it proactively or efficiently. One of my mentors, Nido Qubein says we could benefit from making a list of things to stop doing.

Think about that for a moment, get things done by deciding what WILL NOT get done!