The ugly underbelly of productivity

iStock_000010427793XSmallWorking with a client yesterday I needed to produce a social media plan template.  Easy peasy I thought! With all of the brilliant, numbers-oriented, highly vocal marketers out there surely there will be goo gobs of templates available online that I can find and modify for my clients needs. I was right, but not really.  Yes, there were some fully fledged plans (not as many as I would have thought) but none were right for my client for a variety of reasons. Knowing though that my needs were simple and SURELY there was something that would work available, I kept looking.  Eventually, I gave up and did what I should have done from the start… create the plan from scratch.

That my friends is the underbelly of productivity. The harder we try to be productive… well… the harder we are trying.  So I am not spitting in the eye of George Washington Carver and saying that we should step backward on that whole industrial revolution thing. What I am saying is that the meaning (no I didn’t bother to look it up) of productivity is to do something in a way that is more efficient.  For many of us (me! me! me!) the quest for the more productive method can lead to getting less done. So the question that answers it all? How much time would it take you to do it yourself? Will the attempt at productviity take less? Are you sure?