In an interesting turn of events, we’re spending more time at home than ever before and yet (and yet!) we find ourselves feeling robbed of time. Every minute of our special 24 hours feels like it’s spoken for, thanks to e-learning sessions with the kids, incessant Zoom demands, scouring our local grocery’s online inventory, catching up on headlines, consistently FaceTiming the fam … you know the rest. Between our new normal and the uncertainties that linger outside our doors, it’s easy to go to bed feeling defeated or drained. But why—and for what? Shouldn’t simply existing (while keeping the kids fed and a roof over our family’s heads) in this unfamiliar world qualify as enough by today’s standards?
For some of us, the sheer lack of doing things outside of our at-home routines feels wrong in ways we can’t fully articulate. Jan Lehman, an executive coach, speaker, and founder of Twin Cities-based CTC Productivity, swoops in with a couple of truth bombs like how, for one, we never fully understood what being productive actually meant before all of … [aimlessly waves around] this, anyway.
“People often have the wrong perception of what it’s like to be truly productive,” she says. “Instead, they’re just busy. True productivity is using time wisely. It’s not multitasking or doing a million things in a day. To be productive, you always need to assess what is the right task given the current environment: Am I truly focused to take on a task and be able to accomplish it in one sitting? We see people pick up and put something down multiple times because they’re distracted.” Again, busy with being busy, and not being productive.
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