“Nature does not hurry, yet
everything is accomplished.”—Laozi
Nature does
the right things at the right time. And according to the above stated truth
from the Chinese philosopher, everything in nature gets done steadily and
surely but rarely in haste.
On the
contrary, humans are good at wanting to force things to work at a fast motion
against this fundamental fabric of the universe. Hurry is the way of life for
most people. Modern individuals now live in a frenetic pace where everyone
takes pride in haste and busyness.
However,
with the constant rush to get things done faster and faster, we may end up
doing the wrong things right, instead of doing the right things well. Because
of this, the leadership expert, Peter Drucker said, there is no better waste of
time than doing something excellently good which should not have been done at
all. Therefore, we must never confuse frantic activity with thoughtful
productivity. As Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington rightly said,
“Error is ever the sequence of haste.”
Your hair
grows steadily. The sun rises steadily in its time. The night comes just as
surely but without any rush. Everyone of us who is above the adult age of 18
years gets here day by day, night by night, growing older, one day at a time.
This steady but powerful pattern of growth and life in nature is what we want
to learn to apply on how we work and live.
Concrete
Guide to Intelligent Productivity
These are
three suggestions to guide you daily from mindless distractions and
preoccupation with the sea of minutiae.
1} Know the few critical things that YOU
MUST DO, each day.
2} Work on those right things at their scheduled
time.
3} Create a “buffer-time” on your
schedule to cater for lapses and slight delays—remember, nobody is perfect.
However, it
all begins with a prior plan. So to sustain this for the long term, learn to
plan your days ahead…
Plan Your Day Ahead the
Night Before
As the
saying goes, prior preparation prevents poor performance. Every night, before
you go to bed, try to plan your day ahead on the critical things you need to do
the next day. Make this a priority each night; spend some time to prepare your
action-list for tomorrow. This little planning is important as the Roman poet
of the first century, Publius Statius keenly
observed, “Take time for deliberation. Haste spoils everything.”
How we start
our days have a huge impact on the quality of the entire day. Great success is
the outcome of constantly having our days pre-planned for meaningful activities
that need to get done. Choosing early and steady over hurry turns out to be
more productive than the frenetic and busy life of the masses. So, for the best
of our ability to appear, we need to slow down the forces of haste and hurry in
our lives; and choose to work early and steady, instead.
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