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Sunday, December 6, 2009

Screw productivity : at least for a day


                                                                 Source: iqwolf.org

We all have our "to-do" list, life to live, work at office, and at home. Rushing to and from meetings, social gatherings, cooking, dishes, and other everyday mundane but needs to be chores leaves many of us exhausted by the nightfall.

We are also constantly trying to improve our life, productivity, ourselves. There are tons of books on self help and productivity improvement in the market. We are often obsessed with constantly improving ourselves, myself included. Most of the time, rightly so, however, maybe we should ditch all those list for just one day, and refresh by not doing anything on your list today.

This weekend, I single handedly managed to screw up our whole weekends plan by doing absolutely nothing on my to-do list, unknowingly of course, and we survived. For one example, I planned a local museum outing for kids on Sunday, but Zenguy and I watched slept late on Saturday night watching some random stuff and talking important things. Next morning we woke up late, had late breakfast and did everything late and lazily. Finally we decided to drive late to museum only to realize that they will be closing in 40 minutes, by following winter time schedule. That did not leave much time to explore with 2 small kids, so we decided to skip it completely and revisiting on later day with more time.

So, now we had a long drive to and back from museum without any fruitful outcome that I envisioned, I was livid  at myself, as a generally organized and planned person that I am. But you know what? Little P, got to take much needed nap during our drive back, R got to see different part of town. We detoured our plan by filling gas in a van, grocery shopping and eating at our local favorite hangout and we managed to still have fun. Of course, apart from my hurt ego, everyone was okay. Lesson learned, ditch your plans sometimes and go with flow.Who knows you might survive, might even have fun and recharge yourself for your next day's to-do list.

Go ahead, try it.

This should work for most cases other than life threatening emergencies, so decide first before having a lazy moment or day!!

Have you ever lost your productivity by chance and still things worked out? I would like to hear your stories.

Zengirl

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sometimes not doing things on your list give you time for your brain to rest and work better. Good tips.

Zengirl said...

Anon,

Thanks for stopping by and your comment.

Betsy Bargain said...

Not overscheduling every minute of every day leaves time for spontaneous adventures that might arise! I need to work on this one myself!

Zengirl said...

Betsy Bargain,

Sometimes I think, we plan fun stuff with schedule but taking it easy, go where road takes you may work out. Let me know how it goes for you! I am working on it myself as I wrote. Work in progress.

Quinn said...

When we allow a bit of spontaneity in our lives we open up our selves to learn lessons we would not have encountered otherwise and open ourselves up to opportunity that we had not even seen. Some of my most precious memories come from acting spontaneously.

Zengirl said...

Quinn,.

You are so right about it. Somwhere I along the line, I lost of spontaineity and became productive person. I am going/trying to change that a little.
I know I will slowly. Thanks for stopping by and your comment