Investing in Productivity
I woke up today super excited and confident that today is going to be a good day. Not because I actually have something concrete on the agenda, but because it’s the first day I’m really seeing the impact of a long overdue investment.
Last week, I broke down and bought a new laptop. I’m sure that may seem like something super basic and a fundamental investment for anybody who takes their career seriously, but it was hard for me to do. I haven’t bought a new laptop in almost ten years and had gotten so used to “making it work” that it almost never occurred to me that my old one could be holding me back.
For the past year, I have been very unhappy with my productivity. It took me a while to figure out why I wasn’t getting things done at my usual pace, but I eventually found out that there were two main problems: 1) I wasn’t writing as much and 2) I had taken on too many projects.
The problem writing was one that I couldn’t figure out for a while. I’ve had so many ideas in my head but for some reason could never get the time to write them down. It seemed like whenever i started writing, I stopped just as quickly and never finished. Eventually I realized that my problem had nothing to do with my creativity or what I wanted to write about, but about the tools I was trying to write with. My laptop, which had previously been the best asset in my arsenal, was now a liability. Writing for more than 10-20 minutes usually meant that it would start overheating and the fan would come on and never go off. I bought a fan for it, but that didn’t work. It would do the same thing when I surfed the web for more than ten or twenty minutes. It was never powerful enough to edit video on or create music on, and this stopped me from being productive while I was traveling. The only thing it’s really good for was live shows, which required very little processing power.
Last week I decided I’d had enough. And even though I certainly didn’t want to spend the bread on a new laptop, I had to do it. Why? Because it’s an investment in productivity. And for somebody like me, greater productivity means greater success. The more productive I am, the more things I can create. The more things I create, the more things I can release. The more things I release, the more I earn. The more I earn, the more I can reinvest into myself. It’s something I’ve always known, but I lost track of it because I was so busy trying to save money and do more with less.
There’s a big difference between buying things that you want and buying things as an investment in yourself. Investing in productivity is an investment in yourself, especially if it’s something that ensures you do your job better. In a world where simply showing up and being productive automatically puts us ahead of so much of our competition, have the proper tools is a must.
And that’s why today is a great day. I’m back to writing again. And finally have a tool that will allow me to be as productive as possible. I think you will notice a big difference from this point forward.
Word is Blog.
p.s. Have you recently invested in your own productivity? If so, let me know how you did and what the effect was in the comment section.
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