If everyone was busy walking fast, who invented the wheel?
Let’s be honest. Most of us are infected with the Great Western Disease (GWD), a sickness that primed us to chase productivity faithfully and blindly as if a successful life is about writing a task list and checking off todos.
If you do not complete any todo today, as an infected person, you will feel like you are a total pos. In contrast, it is entertaining to see someone allocate an hour to finish a to-do “write the business plan” without any idea of what will be written.
It is equally hilarious for me to allocate 3 hours for a to-do “draw illustrations for a scientific research paper” only to find out that what actually took me was a relaxing hot shower to enter a creative stage and a drawing session of fewer than 30 mins.
The direction I am getting is to illustrate that how-to-do is as vital as what-to-do. A to-do list only records what you will do but how you will do a task. Therefore, tools and approaches were less emphasized in the GWD productivity pandemic.
The Scandinavians seem immune to this disease as they have a clearer view of life than other parts of the world. Even though on paper, the Nordics may seem to be an underwhelming group with low productivity. Let’s not forget that LEGO was created by Danes, IKEA by Swedes/Danes (I got my Danes friends here), and recent Nobel prize winners in health science are Scandinavians (one Dane and one Swede).
Personally, I don’t have a habit of maintaining a daily to-do list from which I have to check off the tasks because, most of the time, the time needed for a task is either underestimated or overestimated. I can never foresee how much time I will spend completing a task in the morning of the day. Setting an unnecessary time limit for a task only stresses me out instead of helping me ace the task once and for all. More important is that the time I run away from the to-do list is the time I spend on inventing the wheel, so I can come back with a better tool to boost my productivity.
So, here is the question to always remember: If everyone was busy walking fast, who invented the wheel?
Let’s be honest. Most of us are infected with the Great Western Disease (GWD), a sickness that primed us to chase productivity faithfully and blindly as if a successful life is about writing a task list and checking off todos.
If you do not complete any todo today, as an infected person, you will feel like you are a total pos. In contrast, it is entertaining to see someone allocate an hour to finish a to-do “write the business plan” without any idea of what will be written.
It is equally hilarious for me to allocate 3 hours for a to-do “draw illustrations for a scientific research paper” only to find out that what actually took me was a relaxing hot shower to enter a creative stage and a drawing session of fewer than 30 mins.
The direction I am getting is to illustrate that how-to-do is as vital as what-to-do. A to-do list only records what you will do but how you will do a task. Therefore, tools and approaches were less emphasized in the GWD productivity pandemic.
The Scandinavians seem immune to this disease as they have a clearer view of life than other parts of the world. Even though on paper, the Nordics may seem to be an underwhelming group with low productivity. Let’s not forget that LEGO was created by Danes, IKEA by Swedes/Danes (I got my Danes friends here), and recent Nobel prize winners in health science are Scandinavians (one Dane and one Swede).
Personally, I don’t have a habit of maintaining a daily to-do list from which I have to check off the tasks because, most of the time, the time needed for a task is either underestimated or overestimated. I can never foresee how much time I will spend completing a task in the morning of the day. Setting an unnecessary time limit for a task only stresses me out instead of helping me ace the task once and for all. More important is that the time I run away from the to-do list is the time I spend on inventing the wheel, so I can come back with a better tool to boost my productivity.
So, here is the question to always remember: If everyone was busy walking fast, who invented the wheel?