Defining Personal Productivity

Today, the ProductivityCast team talks about terminology, that is, what are the terms that we use in the personal productivity space? And why is there so much confusion around those particular words that we use?

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In this Cast | Defining Personal Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Defining Personal Productivity

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Raw Text Transcript | Defining Personal Productivity

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Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:23
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode. Today, we are going to be talking about terminology. That is, what are the terms that we use in the personal productivity world, and really, why there is so much confusion around those particular words that we use the importance of them. And then we’ll talk about some of the terms that we all have defined over time. Some words, we’ve created some terms, or phrases we’ve created, and why. And then, of course, what we can do to make this a little bit more useful for everybody. And so let’s start off with why is this important? What’s the importance of the productivity terminology, the personal productivity, terminology that we use every day,

Augusto Pinaud 1:11
when, when I begin working into personal productivity and researching into practice, personal productivity, one of the things that surprised me was the definition that most people have off time. Mostly because the definition has nothing to do with time and everything to do with scarcity. Actually, if you pull a dictionary, the definition that most people have of time is actually the definition of viscosity. So as you look and begin from the wrong definition, to build personal productivity, the only thing you can do is build a rock model. You know, when you start with wrong assumptions, it’s hard to build something that actually works. And that works for you. And that is the problem. And that happened was so many of the definitions plus invented work that some experts for color in some way are so people who study to spend time and study and decide to create to define things that it makes sense on the sale of the book that they’re trying to do, but not necessarily on the definitions that people manage. And all that create. Over the long term is confusion.

Francis Wade 2:28
I think it’s an unavoidable confusion because we are talking about psychological objects, not physical objects. And psychological objects have a history to them. They change over time. And they’re they’re made up and they are, they’re very dependent on Lang on the language that you happen to be speaking in. We had a conversation off air about German language, German, and how words get made up all the time. And that’s very easy to do when you’re talking about intangible psychological objects. It’s harder to do when you’re talking about a tree, which you know, a tree today is pretty much the same tree as it was million years ago. But something like insomnia is a pretty recently made up word, because like 100 years old, and the way we use it obviously, is very different than people thought about insomnia 100 years ago. So a word like time when Weinstein came along and led us to think very differently about time. And before clocks were invented in this 12 or 1300s. People thought very differently about time then also. So as we create these words, they allow us to do different things. They help us in some ways, they hold us back and others. But the truth is that the meanings keep changing. And the fact that they keep changing, meaning that we have to pay attention to them, if we want to use them to, for example, make improvements in our individual lives, we don’t have a choice. This is like a moving target. Bunch of moving targets.

Art Gelwicks 4:11
Yeah, to meet the definition, debate falls into the same realm as in rules for games. If you’re not playing by the same rules, you’re not going to know what the objectives are, you’re not going to accomplish or achieve the common goals. So if you use a parallel, say American football, if everybody does not know or agree to what a touchdown means, then anybody can run around saying they scored a touchdown. There’s a common definition, there is an agreed upon standard of measure. And that’s what so many definitions provide is that standardized concept of measure and unfortunately, within the productivity space, that seems to be one of the sponginess things that we have is getting everybody to agree on And what definitions actually are. And there’s two things that I run into all the time. And I’ve caught myself doing it. And I have to correct when I do it as well. One is I miss identification of definitions, applying the wrong definition for something, because that’s what we think it means. But we’re not 100%. Sure. The other one, and I almost want to say it’s a little bit more insidious is the adaptation of definitions to support a particular model, platform, agenda, whatever you want to say, to put something into place, so that it goes Oh, see, because productivity is x, my stuff is accurate as why? Well, that’s assuming that everybody agrees that x is what productivity is, and I don’t believe that’s the case. And so many, so many situations. So having a common definition for things that is, I don’t want to say globally, agreed upon, but as closely commonly agreed upon as possible, really makes this even approachable. When we start to look at improving people’s productivity and efficiency.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:15
I somewhat agree. And I think that what you’re talking about there, art is probably why I have so many terms of art that I have created for all kinds of personal productivity situations, except that mine was built out of necessity, not out of building a model, and then choosing to shove a square peg into a round hole, it was, oh, this thing that I’m doing needs for me to define it. So I can explain it to others. And so it became a just a need to be able to create something to contain that new thought, that new method process or whatnot. And so I’m hopefully doing it on the opposite side of what you’re talking about, which is I’m not, I’m not creating something and then trying to pigeonhole these pieces into it. But really choosing to embrace the, the term because it helps it’s helpful in being able to explain it to others, I also find that my biggest challenge with personal productivity terminology is that we don’t know whose term we’re using, when we talk about any given term. If someone says to me, something I know like a time demand, I’m very clear, in the sense that I know that that came from a certain Francis Wade. And so if we go ahead and then say to me, Oh, well, a time demand is something else, not the one that I know is the term or the phrase created by Francis that I’m lost. And we don’t have that kind of contextual framework. Right now, in the personal productivity community, people will use certain things like task or to do or even personal productivity, but they haven’t really given us the foundation for what they mean by that. And when we enter into conversation, we’re not in the appropriate context, you’re talking about time blocking, or time boxing, or any of those other terms that are kind of loose, they can be defined many different ways. We’re talking past each other, because you may think of it as being something very different than I think of it as being frequently, you know, we use the methodology getting things done. If we all were to define what getting things done well is today, we’d all have different definitions. And that is because we take pieces from the methodology. And I find that to also be somewhat confusing for people, when we then take that from the kind of macro level, have a methodology and when we bleed it down to the very individual pieces. Methods are incredibly difficult to, quote unquote, define because they are by nature, inst