Contents
Contents
- Introduction
- Defining your organising principle
- The importance of harmonised values
- Building solid values and habits that support your daily efforts
- Conclusion
Introduction
The modern world is obsessed with productivity. We’re all looking for ways to gain more and to become more. We want to be more successful, more capable, and wealthier. It’s no wonder then, that the desire to boost productivity levels is at the forefront of many people’s minds.
Boosting your productivity levels will lead to a greater chance of success in life, as one of the key factors that underpins success is the ability to be productive. In other words, to be efficient in what you do. Pair this productivity with consistency, and the chances of achieving success will be much greater than leaving things up to chance.
Success, however, doesn’t come easily, and the path to it requires significant understanding and skilful exploitation of the right circumstances.
With that being said, I’ll be showing you three principles that you can adopt to become a productive powerhouse and boost your chances of success in the future.
Defining your organising principle
I’m sure you’re tired of hearing this, but structured goals are an absolute necessity for improved productivity and success. Many experts advocate the numerous benefits of long-term goals. However, I will go one step further and suggest that which the 20th century German philosopher Nietzsche termed the ‘organising idea’. Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo:
‘’…the organizing idea that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down – it begins to command, slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that will one day prove to be indispensable as a means toward a whole – one by one, it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task, “goal,” “aim,” or “meaning.”
In other words, the organising idea refers to an overarching goal in life that provides the necessary framework to make the ‘right’ choices in life. In short, it’s an ultimate goal that’s aligned with your individual nature and the accompanying personal values and influences your short, medium, and long-term actions in the its direction.
I believe that the organising idea is essential, for people’s lives are complex and our surroundings even more so. It’s easy to lose oneself in the dizzying amounts of information we have to contend with on a daily basis.
Even the most rational and organised person is a victim to the discontinuity of consciousness. It’s the same reason that he British Enlightenment philosopher David Hume was known for saying that people are “nothing but a bundle of different perceptions”.
Without a framework in place to keep us on track, we are apt to fill our minds indiscriminately with impressions from our environment. As such, we are likely to (unconsciously) take on the opinions, habits, and attributes of people from our surroundings. If left uncontrolled, this process will result in the creation of a motley mind, scattered in thought, values, and actions.
It is for this reason that the organising idea is key. As we deliberately set a theme to the narrative of our life, we are able to choose and select what we want to incorporate into our mind and ultimately, life. This conscious process allows us to take up what is necessary and good, and avoid what is not useful or even harmful to our being and our endeavours.
Picking an organising idea is a daunting task. It’d naturally be difficult to condense the immensity of a life into just one goal. However, through personal experience, I’ve found that everyone tends to have an ‘essence’ or perhaps a well-defined narrative in their life, if they look deep enough. Even Nietzsche’s aforementioned writing has a hint of ‘destiny’ in it.
Understanding what your ‘essence’ or narrative is, is a great gift, because it can shed light onto who you are as a person. In a way, our lives are characterised by certain themes which tend to be recurrent. I believe that following these themes and exploring them allows us to understand in more detail the nature of ourselves, and by extension, our goals.
The importance of harmonised values
It’s as the old adage goes: Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither will you be able to achieve your life’s goal(s) in a day, a month, or even a year. In fact, such life work is continual and will likely take several lifetimes to actually finish.
That’s an intimidating thought, especially when considering our human, all too human, limitations. Therefore, we have to sub-divide the organising idea into more manageable chunks, to not lose interest in our endeavour.
If the organising idea is a long-long-term goal, we have to subdivide it into other long-term, medium-term, and short-term goals that are aligned with the principle(s) of the organising idea. Dividing the work into more manageable chunks keeps you motivated and on track to achieve your organising idea. By focussing on one goal at a time, you will be able to see consistent progress and boost your sense of achievement
You can divide your goals according to time. So, if an organising idea takes a lifetime to achieve, a long-term could be anywhere from 3-10 years, a medium-term goal around 1-2 years, and a short-term goal, a couple of months.
By having several goals strategically laid out, you can leverage the momentum you gain from shorter-term goals into longer-term goals. This will keep your motivation and productivity levels high and consistent. After all, since the purpose of an organising idea is to align your actions, values, and goals, each goal should flow into one another and add momentum to the next goal.
Building solid values and habits that support your daily efforts
Our personal values are extremely important in directing and sustaining our mental efforts. In fact, they can be considered the lifeblood of the mind. And the right values can make your life, whereas the wrong values can break it. Values are those principles that provide us with meaning and direction in life, they culminate and mature within us with time, and if you treat them with care, they will do wonders for you.
As such, values are extremely important to sustain the organising idea. And they serve to function as daily motivators to carry out the (tedious) tasks that are required in order to progress towards your goals. For this reason, values need to be carefully chosen, maintained, and reflected upon.
We all have values, and our values are underpinned by our unique and varying temperaments. Likewise, our pursuits, actions, and behaviours are all influenced by what we value (and by extension what we don’t value).
It’s for this reason that we need our values to be in line with our organising idea. This way, we’re able to supercharge our values with meaning. As a result, we’ll be more motivated to act in line with our organising idea, and consequently we’ll be more successful in working towards any of our goals.
In summary, with the right values, you will be able to cultivate the right habits. Given enough time and effort, this will inevitably translate into the fulfilment of your short, medium, long, and long-long-term goals.
Building habits for success
If solid values are the roads to success, solid habits are the means of transport. By ensuring that you have a functional habit system, you’re making a great investment into your future success. The purpose of solidifying habits as part of a daily routines is to allow you to automatically get into the productivity state without the fuss.
Habits take around 66 days on average to solidify (Lally et al., 2009), but can take shorter or longer depending on circumstances (and personalities). A solidified habit is a great gift, as you will be able to carry out your productive work without much thought; your body will act automatically, without much initial input.
From my personal experience, the best way to form habits is to associate them with a positive experience of some kind. The body eventually comes to enjoy the habit due to the positive experience associated with it. A great example would be a morning reading session and a cup of coffee.
Reading in the morning might not be your favourite thing at first, but a cup of coffee helps off-set any reluctance. After a few attempts, you’ll find yourself craving a read just much as you crave a cup of coffee in the morning.
Habit stacking
A great way to make your routine even more productive is by stacking your habits. Once you’ve solidified a set habitual routine, you can add to this routine by continuing to build on what you have, one habit at a time.
The purpose of habit stacking is to use your existing habitual routine to form an even more elaborate and complex routine. Having built a productive routine, you’ve already overcome a great barrier, this makes carrying out subsequent tasks less mentally (and emotionally) draining. In short, it’s a win-win!
Conclusion
Though there are many tricks to force ourselves to be productive, they tend to be ineffective over time because they lack the underlying reasons to sustain productivity. The desire to be successful itself is often not sufficient in itself in order to achieve it. Success must be founded on solid principles, values, and consistent efforts. Lacking this, we might make temporary strides towards success, but will eventually falter due to our lack of motivation and grit.
It is for this reason that we must look inside. By understanding who we are as individuals, what our inherent talents are, what we value, and how we define success, we’re able to formulate a successful organising idea and secure the necessary means to achieve this great goal.
It is by approaching success from a holistic perspective that we can appreciate it more realistically and find greater joy in the path that leads towards it.
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Sources:
Lally, P. et al. (2009) “How are habits formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the real world,” European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), pp. 998–1009. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674.
