Produktivität

It's the penultimate day of my challenge, and there's something I need to get off my chest before the finale. There's something I've learned that is incredibly important: the willingness to start fresh every day.

Sometimes I feel a little stuck. Often, there are just too many options, and I find myself examining each one carefully, wondering which I should choose. Do I go left or do I go right? Which path brings me closer to my goal?

I often catch myself getting distracted instead of just picking an option.

You can read 5 books on increasing your productivity and achieve exactly the opposite: namely, nothing. Reading a book means you're not starting a project. Productivity equals zero.

Actually, succeeding is quite simple: just do what you believe needs to be done and everything will be fine. It just doesn't work, and it's definitely not because you don't know what to do. At the start of my productivity challenge, I spent a lot of time on strategic planning. I asked myself how I even know which path to take and how can I be sure it's the right one. I thought all along that I just needed to find the right path and everything would be fine. That's precisely the misconception.

Running shares many parallels with life. The experiences I've had while running often translate to both my personal and professional daily life.

Don't Outrun Your Pace

If you start out faster than your usual pace, you’ll quickly reach a point where overexertion forces you to stop. Good pace management is therefore essential. Find your own limit to be fast, but not so fast that you overexert yourself.

Bringing a project to a success also means having a clear prioritization. But what do you do when priorities change from one day to the next? When tomorrow you no longer believe in the success of today's project?

This article is about changing priorities and how to tame indecision.

Perhaps first of all, changing priorities are normal. I say so now. I experience it in myself and have observed it often enough in others.

There's a good chance that you consume significantly more than you produce on the other side. Our information-packed world serves us beautifully draped consumer morsels at every turn. A TikTok video here, a news item there, and the new mobile game is already waiting in the wings.

There's nothing wrong with consumption. But it makes a difference whether you consume excited news or a well-thought-out book. Moreover, the preponderance of consumption in relation to creation has increased significantly.

One of my most important insights of the last years: Procrastination is cheating yourself. To procrastinate means that you waste your time in every way. You don't use it to do the things that need to be done, nor do you use it to properly relax and gather your strength. The truly worst form of procrastination, however, is pseudo-work. You may know the phenomenon: often you find yourself in a situation where you can't find the strength to pursue a thing effectively and instead you settle for minimally dealing with it in some way.