It’s Not What You Know, It’s What You Do Consistently That Counts
A high-value output strategy.
For the past year, I’ve stopped focusing on the little things that don’t matter — busy work — and started focusing daily on high-value activities that make a difference — like, writing.
This shift changed my life.
The most significant difference is I’m no longer busy, I’m productive.
The second impact is I’m making money from what I produce.
I work from home and set my own hours. I can work from my bed, my porch, my backyard, my local coffee shop, or from Mexico. My writing is no longer a hobby because I’m treating it like a job, a job I have to show up for, or be fired.
A job I don’t dread. I have to do it because I’m compelled to write.
When you let go of mindless hyperactive activities — distractions — and produce, write and create, you see the needle move on your life, your business, and your work.
I have always been highly organized in every area of my life, which is nice, everything has its place. I can find what I’m looking for in my house, my car, my office, and my laptop, but being organized has little to do with the daily production of high-value results. I may have been busy organizing my life, but I wasn’t accomplishing much until this past year.
Organized, yes.
Busy, yes
Productive, no.
Busy with Twitter notifications and emails and stop-and-go traffic and Facebook and Instagram and breaking CNN news updates and Netflix and voicemails and texts, and buying things I don’t need on Amazon, but not with anything that adds real value to my life.
When you focus on the things that matter — essential tasks, like writing — you feel more motivated, less stressed with increased energy and focus. I’ve experienced this first-hand.
The more I focus on the one thing I’m determined to do — write — the more productive I feel, the better I sleep at the end of the day, the more energized I am the next morning, and the more satisfied I feel at the end of the week.
That is not to say it is easy. Some days it is not.
The world is upside down right now. There is no new normal yet, but rather an evolving normal. It changes daily. This can be draining. The ups and downs of uncertainty take mental energy to navigate. One way to make the evolving normal easier to cope with is to have something in your life that feeds you, gives you energy after you’ve spent a few hours of your day giving it your attention.
When you feel you are contributing something to the world, that feeling of productivity drives you forward, compelling you to get better at the task, cultivating a passion for what it is you’re working on.
We underestimate how much we can create if we concentrate on one goal for the first part of our day for a solid two to three hours.
We underestimate the quality of distraction-free thinking, doing, writing, creating.
The better you get at something, the more you want to do it. It’s a cycle.
Eventually, after creating a habit, you want to concentrate more on your goal because you’ve gotten better from daily practice, you’ve cultivated a passion.
Passion often doesn’t just fall into our laps, the fire needs to be stoked. It may for a lucky few, but for the rest of us, we have to cultivate something we’re interested in, turning it into a passion.
I published my first Medium post a year ago and posted nearly every day since.
For the first three months, it was difficult to write an article every single day, because I was not in the habit of writing.
After three months, my writing skills were stronger. The act of writing got easier because my writing muscle gained strength. The better I got, the more I wanted to write. The more I wrote, the more results I saw from a daily writing practice — income, readers, followers, other opportunities.
It is truly incredible how you can see direct results from concentrating on one task for three hours uninterrupted daily. It is the steadiness of daily practice, which makes the difference.
It didn’t matter how organized my life was, or how much I know even, what made the difference in high-value results was writing consistently. It is a simple answer, but not easy to implement.
If you want to write a novel, which is easier and more possible? Sitting down in the chair and writing an entire chapter in one day, or writing for two hours uninterrupted daily. Few have the willpower for the former, but many of us are capable of the latter. You have two hours a day.
As Cal Newport says,
There’s a lot written about task productivity (the ability to organize and execute non-skilled obligations), but much less written about value productivity (the ability to consistently produce highly-skilled, highly-valued output).
For entrepreneurs and writers, being organized is important, but what we aim for is a high level of value productivity.
Another way of looking at this is, working smarter and not harder.
How to get to high-value productivity
Identify what activities generate the highest returns, and the focus relentlessly on those and exclude all other activities.
If this means your house is more disorganized than you’d like for a bit, that may be the price to pay for high-value output or hire someone to clean your home for you.
By eliminating distractions like internet, social media, email, texts, and cleaning your living room, you can extract value from the limited hours you chose to write, or execute the one thing that matters most to you.
To get this done, implement a system.
For writers make it simple. One system is what Jerry Seinfeld calls “don’t break the chain” strategy.
If you want to be a writer, yet don’t dedicate daily time to writing, you are fooling yourself. It is what we spend our hours on that make up our priorities and life.
If you are binging Netflix daily more than you are writing, then Netflix is your priority.
A simple way to give time to what you say you value is using the “don’t break the chain” strategy. It is simple. All you need is a calendar and a red pen.
In an article by Brad Issac, he relates Seinfeld’s advice to him,
“to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day.
[…]
— even when you don’t feel like it.”
Seinfeld uses a rudimentary calendar system, but it works.
His advice,
Get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step is to get a big red magic marker. Each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. After a few days, you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it, and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.
You can use this strategy for any task you want to see high-value output; exercising, developing a business, creating content, writing a screenplay, a TV pilot, or a book.
Just don’t break the chain. Daily action builds habit. It is consistently that counts.
I did something similar with my Medium experiment.
One year later, I haven’t broken the chain. When you skip one day, it is easier to skip the next. So, don’t break the chain. If you don’t break the chain, watch your high-value output soar.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
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