Motion or Progress
If you’re struggling to achieve your goals or to get expected results, then you should read this.
Motion doesn’t implies progress… You probably know this already, but I doubt you have reflected on how this applies to your life.
What is a motion?
Physics defines motion as "the change in position of an object with respect to its surroundings in a given interval of time". This closely relates with the dictionary meaning that explains that motion is "the action or process of moving or being moved".
Now that we have defined motion, let’s define progress
Although physics doesn’t have any direct definition of progress, a close term to progress in physics will be acceleration. And the dictionary defines progress as "forward or onward movement towards a destination".
It was important to define these key terms to aid our understanding of motion and progress.
I will not be discussing an obvious motion that is not progress- backwards motion. This is because we mostly know when we are moving backwards, when the ordeal of our life isn't showing any feasible and measurable progress.
To begin, I believe that many of us reading this will agree with me that being busy and being productive are two different things. Yes both will require a series of activities, effort and perhaps expectations of a result. But ultimately the difference is measured by the outcome of the activity. This implies that you might not be able to judge easily if you are just being busy or you are indeed productive.
One major observation I have is that for everyone engaging in an activity, irrespective of the approach taken, a larger percentage of people usually have an expectation inclined towards a positive and fruitful outcome. While this is not surprising, many are not able to determine if the activity they are engaging in (steps towards the set goal) is the best approach to attain efficiency and the expected result.
Using myself as a specimen:
To determine whether or not I was busy or productive I had to do something economist call "scale of preference".
I was shocked to find out that I was engaged in so many activities beyond what I would rationally take on. I say this because I impulsively accepted responsibilities and committed myself to anything that interested me. So yes, I was very busy and I knew I always had something to attend to- a pending meeting or a deadline that could soil my reputation.
To me, my round the clock schedule implied productivity and the more I could get done, the better for me. However, at the instance that I sat to write my "scale of preference", I realised that many of my commitments appeared to be "important" and yes maybe they were but not enough to get me to my ultimate goal (a bigger picture of the result I expected from all my responsibilities and commitment).
How did I determine the essential, important and not so important activities/commitment?
As you would expect, it boils down to first knowing what you want. This will be more of a discovering purpose kind of task but I won’t want to bore you with this here (click this to read my thoughts on discovery purpose).
One common analogy will be you heading to a certain destination A.
You see to head to destination A, you must first know that you are heading to destination A, why you are heading to destination A and how long you will be spending at destination A.
You should have a clear answer to the above questions before you can then consider how to get to destination A and the cost of destination A.
Now I will assume you have answers to the first three questions (you must first know that you are heading to destination A, why you are heading to destination A and how long you will be spending at destination), gauging activities that are essential, important or not so important now revolves around the last two questions (how to get to destination A and the cost of destination A)
Following the analogy, to determine HOW to get to destination A sounds straightforward but it isn’t. Determining HOW is very dynamic and here is why:
- There will be different routes to destination A
- Some routes will be faster than the others
- Some routes will be more expensive than the others
- Some routes will be safer than the others
So now that you have seen how dynamic the HOW can be, you will wonder what the best way to find the HOW will be.
From my experience and an aggregate experience from a lot of books I have read, the best way to find "HOW" is to ask someone that has gone to destination A before or maybe even someone that has gone through all the available routes.
A person that is very conversant with destination A will know the best way to get to destination A, what sort of preparation that will be needed, the cost of transport and how long the journey will be.
Nigerians will say: follow who knows road but hold you teefare.
This also implies that although the person can give as many guide as possible on HOW to get to your destination, the person cannot pay the price for you to get to the your destination.
Only in a rare 0.1% occasion will you find someone to pay the price for you to get to your destination. And even if so, you still have to be present in the right vehicle.
Linking this back to me creating a scale of preference for myself, I realized that for "my destination", most of the activites I was engaged in were not needed to get to my destination. This activites are those I labelled the not important activities/commitments.
Thereafter, I noticed some activities were interesting and kept me feeling lively but didn’t contribute to my destination, this were my leisure activities and I labelled them the not so important activities (although some will argue that this activites are equally important as leisure is a compulsory balance for everyone)
Then I was left with two categories of activities, the important and the essential activites.
I will like to compare the dictionary meaning of this two words but I am leaving that for you (I am certain most people reading this already know the difference)
All activites left after my first two filter (not important/not-so-important) were important, however not everyone of them were essential.
To determine the essential activites/commitment, I applied the Pareto Principle or what others know has the 80/20 rule.
This principle simply suggest that 20% of the activites we engage in produces 80% of our total result. (The application of this principle is quite extensive, I recommend you read more about it here). Therefore all I had to do was recognize the 20% of my activities that gave me or at least has the potential of giving me 80% of my expected result.
Surprisingly, of my about 10 important activities, only 2 were essential. And you can believe me not to make this up. I was truly just doing alot and misallocating my resources and time.
Of course as you can already guess, recognizing my essential task helped to prioritize my time and resource allocation. First I completely stopped all activites that were not important, next I allocated 10% of my time and resources to the not-so-important activities and then 30% to my important activities and the remaining 60% to the essential activites/commitments.
The result is that I moved from being busy (motion- not ultimately achieving what I should be) to being productive (progress- becoming more focus, less fatigued and smashing my goals easily).
Conclusively, this explains that not all motion implies progress just as being busy doesn’t necessarily implies productively.
If you feel like you are stuck, or you feel lazy and find it difficult to achieve your set goals despite several trial and effort, then you should subscribe to my Medium Page because I will sharing detailed steps to see through even if you have ADHD.
Give me as many clap as you wish. See you soon.
