PILLAR 5
Being Busy Versus Being Productive
The biggest lie ever told is this: busy means productive. The truth is that you could be working hard, staying up nights, getting up early, putting in the hours, and still be moving in the wrong direction. You can feel like you are doing all the right things when in fact, you are moving further away from your goal. It’s an easy trap to fall into. I’ve done it. Countless other successful people have done it.
If you are taking care of others besides yourself, you know how busy things can get. But just being busy doesn’t mean you are being productive. For example, some of us will go through the entire house to pick up three items of clothing and bring them to the laundry room. Instead, we can choose two days out of the week to focus on laundry. A lot of us are also on the lookout for a good bargain. We keep an eye on what’s on sale at Walmart and know what days are best to hit Target. Because of this, we may go out one day for a gallon of milk and then make a completely separate trip on another day to another store to get a jar of peanut butter. Instead, we could pick one day out of the week to do all the food shopping rather than constantly making trips to the store. Making multiple trips is busy, for sure, but it’s not productive. It is much more productive to have full days of activity when you know you are going to get everything on your list done in one fell swoop. In this pillar, I want you to internalize the difference between busy and productive.
None of us are perfect. We are all going to have to learn as we go. Right now, I want you to focus on the accomplishment, not the activity. Some people get satisfaction as a result of their intentions. They listen to online seminars for eight hours and proudly tell everyone that they worked on their business all day. They make list after list after list and call it a day. Those are not accomplishments. They are activities. Don’t get lost in the activity, and don’t let the satisfaction from a completed activity cloud your judgment. Instead of making to-do lists, focus on the list of what you actually did all day. List the accomplishments you have already completed, and focus on those.
Being too busy to be productive is like being on an airplane that is going in the wrong direction. Think about it. Even though it’s one of the most amazing inventions ever—a massively productive force—it can do everything it is meant to do and still actually be unproductive. How? Its engines can be in tip-top shape and its pilot and staff can be top notch, but if it is going in the wrong direction, all that effort and energy and engineering is actually taking it away from its ultimate goal. Sure, it’s doing what it was designed to do, but it is not actually getting you to where you need to be.
“What does this have to do with me, Johnny?” you might ask. Well. I’ve been in sales my entire life. At 18 and 19, I was a telemarketer while working my way through acting school. Then I became a licensed insurance agent and earned my license to sell home security systems for the state of Texas. Then I started my own business. I have sold books, companies, and partnerships. In all those years of salesmanship, here is what I have learned: just because people look busy, it doesn’t mean that they are productive. I have seen so many people in the home-based business sector lose so much because they are too busy to actually be productive. They work and plan and work and plan, but they don’t actually move the needle in the right direction. It’s heartbreaking to watch.
Take the people who do sales blitzes as an example. A blitz typically means you are going to go all out, put all your effort into selling, selling, selling—for 1 day, for 7 days, even for 90 days. It sounds impressive, right? But here is the problem: just because people are busy being busy, it doesn’t mean they are doing something productive. In sales, people think throwing things up against the wall to see what sticks is being productive. But it is not. You can’t just pick up the phone and call everyone on your list. You need to make sure that you make each call in a way that brings you closer to your goal. You can’t waste time trying everything to see if even half the things work. The things that don’t work are a waste of your time. You must attack all of your calls and strategies as if you have an emotional connection to each and every one of those attempts.
I’ve seen people go into war rooms, just dialing and making calls, but they don’t know whom they are calling or why they are calling them. What’s the most effective way to reach out to this person? If you don’t have the who, why, and what answered before you go in, you run the risk of being very busy but unproductive. Wayne Gretzky has said that “100 percent of the shots you don’t take never go in.” But Wayne didn’t take his hockey stick to the baseball field hoping to hit a home run. He didn’t take it to the golf course thinking he would win the Stanley Cup. He focused his attention and energy on hockey and succeeded.
I want you to swing, I want you to be aggressive, I want you to charge toward your passion—as long as what you are charging toward is actually part of your target.
Value your time. Value your experience. And value your education. So many of my mentees have invested so much in themselves—through seminars, through classes, and through simply doing the work. When they start to rise, however, friends and acquaintances flock to them for free advice. They then become busy helping others for free, which is the opposite of productivity. I tell them that in order to turn those hours of help they are giving away into actual productivity, they have to monetize the situations they are already in. For example, giving good advice over a cup of coffee. Or charging for your products instead of “helping out a friend.” Or providing concrete feedback on a product or marketing idea. Every hour you help someone for free is an hour away from your kids or an hour you could have been charging your clients or business. Stop being too busy being helpful because if you don’t stop, you will be helping everyone but yourself.
Take a look at your day-to-day schedule. Are you busy but not productive? If so, how? Now look at your ideas and the specific steps you wrote down in Pillar 4. Are the activities in your calendar helping you move toward that goal or not? If any of them are not directly contributing to your goal, they need to go. Remember, one of the character traits of first-generation millionaires is that they value themselves. Practice that characteristic now by showing yourself that you value your time, energy, and money. Don’t waste those precious commodities on simply being busy. Be productive.
ACTION STEP
Take a look at your calendar, and identify the good but unproductive things listed there. You can have something on there that you think is productive, but if it doesn’t directly help you reach your goal—if it doesn’t contribute to your success in a linear way—take it off your calendar until you reach your goal. It must come off the calendar.
If you are doing things that keep you busy but don’t help you reach your goal, then you are moving away from that very goal you set. Remember, you need to prepare for your ideas, but it only counts as preparing if your work, time, and resources contribute to your goal. If you don’t need to do it, take it off your calendar. It’s as simple as that.
PILLAR 5