My personal “Personal Agility” story

A recent in-house workshop I facilitated on Career Goals (and the productivity towards them) reminded me of my personal “Personal Agility” story and how I found out what “Really Matters: (WRM) to me. Finding WRM has a lot to do on how we set goals. It is challenging, and I am certain, that some challenges addressed in the workshop might sound familiar to some of us:

• I do have an idea on my career goal, but it is always so blurry, and I can’t get it more concrete.
• I do have a goal, but how do I stay motivated to always be on track and on course?
• When I have set a goal, daily operations or other distractions interfere with them, so I cannot achieve those goals.

During my journey within the Personal Agility system, I found answers to those 3 challenges for me. It all had to do with identifying what really matters in my life. In Personal Agility, we call this “our Jamaica”: We imagine that our life is like being on a boat in the ocean. And our destination is to reach the beaches of Jamaica.

I believe, by now, I have found my Jamaica, and it is very close to, what we also can call our Ikigai: the Venn-diagram-intersection of what we love, what we are good at, what the world needs, and what we can be paid for. And this not only gives us satisfaction, but makes us more productive.

The myths of productivity

Let’s rewind a bit: Regularly I ask people, how they would define productivity. And most answers are similar to ”doing as much as possible in a given timeframe”. And similarly, I also thought that my satisfaction for my personal productivity is coming through the following statements:

• Being busy means I am more productive.
• When I have a lot of output, I have accomplished more.
• I have failed, if I did not get done, what I had planned.
• The more detailed I plan my work, the better the productivity and outcome.
• We need to find a way to automate task management, so I have more time to do actual work, instead of planning my work.

I actually knew and taught already, that productivity is not about doing as much as possible, but delivering as much value as possible. I just never applied that for myself. The first epiphany and life-changing learning from applying Personal Agility was, in the end, that personal productivity on your own tasks is not measured by the outcome or output of your tasks, but by your own personal satisfaction and happiness. The second epiphany was to learn that productivity is a consequence of your past and not of your plan for the future. That may sound confusing, but it is related to a core concept of the Personal Agility System: Celebrate & Choose.

Celebrate & Choose

The Personal Agility System recommends within the Priority’s Map and Breadcrumb Trail to keep a history of what you have achieved for each past week. Usually, when we get a task done, we remove it from our board and throw it away. We are happy, it is out of the way, and we therefore move on. Therefore, I was a bit hesitant to follow the suggestion and keep my own history.

But Peter Stevens, the inventor of PAS and facilitator, showed us in the class, what he had in his Breadcrumb Trail and I remember, how we all were genuinely impressed about his productivity. So, I gave it a shot. On top of just keeping the breadcrumb trail, I also ensured, that the achieved task in each week of the breadcrumb was ordered by the effort I spent on this task (most effort on top) as well as, I added a “Made me happy” label on each task I enjoyed or which made me feel accomplished.

In the so-called weekly Celebrate & Choose Event, I then could see, how much effort I spent on things I enjoyed. Naturally, I wanted as many “made me happy” tasks as possible on top of each week. This helped me to shift my priorities and understood more about what really mattered for me in my life. I did not get more done technically, but the clarity about my tasks in the past helped me to gear my priorities in the right direction and focused on activities towards my own goal. This rewarded me with satisfaction and happiness and built confidence for the plan in the future. A nice side effect was, how I learned to say “No” more confident to projects or assignments, which were not helping towards my goals.

And I learned: Often, we set the goals for ourselves not based on what we want to do, but based on what is expected from us. But is that, what makes us happy? If not, it may not be our Jamaica.

Emotional Self-Awareness is key for productivity

Keeping a board constantly up-to-date is work and takes effort. But, what if the above seems too much work, and so we do not really update it constantly?

In the workshop mentioned in the introduction, we addressed tips and tricks on how to write good goals, break them into smaller achievable sub goals and develop a routine to stay on track on your goals. But nothing in there was new to anybody. All those tools and practices are easily discoverable online. The question, why some of our goals are so hard to achieve or hard to stay on track, is the question of how those goals are related to our Jamaica.

So, I showed the participants the below matrix, which could be a shortcut to find your Jamaica. I asked them to think about one of their goals and how they feel about them. If they could find an emotional state in the below matrix, they should take a sticky note and stick it on the feeling they have.

Most of the sticky notes ended up in the right top quadrant. This seems to be a good sign, that the participants found a goal towards their Jamaica. But that perception may change. We might get stressed if time passes by, and we did not get closer to our goal. Or initially, we are excited about the goal, but then over time, we realize it is not really making us happy (remember the Breadcrumb Trail). Therefore, I suggest doing the analysis of how you feel about your goal regularly. If your emotional state when thinking about the goal changes into another quadrant than the one on the top right, it may have not been your Jamaica after all.

Discipline is a mindset, not a productivity tool

Celebrate & Choose is a great tool, which changed my life. A friend asked me recently, if there would be a tool, which would help him to automate some of those activities. It takes so much time to keep the board updated, and it would take away some much time of his day to do “meaningful work”.

But using that time every day and/or every week to do the manual work, update my priorities, ensure, that I celebrate, what I really enjoyed and choose the next activities is meaningful work.

Remember, productivity is not about, how much you can get done in a given timeframe; for yourself and your own productivity, it is about how much happiness you can achieve in a given timeframe. This gives you much more confidence about your future productivity, than any tool or automation could do. Blocking time every day or every week to reflect, if this what you are doing is helping you to get closer to your goal, is absolutely crucial. If you are just automating that process, your emotional awareness is missing. You just become a task-machine, but are you really productive?