Let Love for Others Drive Your Productivity
We all face the temptation to pit people against productivity.
“I could get a lot more work done if I didn’t have to attend all of these meetings.”
“I can’t finish this project because people keep dropping by my desk.”
“There’s no way I can effectively work from home because everyone else in my house is working from home, too.”
We buy the lie that people (co-workers, phone calls, or toddlers underfoot in our home office) are the enemy of our productivity. That given enough alone time and “heads down” focus, we’d check every single thing off of our to-do list.
But what if we looked at people not as the barrier to our ability to get things done, but the motivation to get things done?
It’s a subtle but significant difference.
In his fantastic book Habits of Grace, David Mathis says we should “let love for others be the driver of [our] disciplined, intentional calendaring.”
Here’s how that strikes me: I need to be ruthlessly efficient with mapping my ideal week so I don’t let the work week bleed into the weekend. Or so I can cleanly put my to-do list to bed at the end of one work day, ignoring it until the start of the next. Or so I can build in margin where I don’t view co-worker drop-ins as a threat, but as a blessing.
I don’t know about you, but I still fight to view productivity as a tool I can use to love people better, and not the other way around.
When we don’t plan our work lives, we let our work life plan our personal life.
Let’s let love for people be the driving motivation for our productivity.
