Albert didn’t consider himself unique in any special respect. Just the opposite: he knew his job insights and skills were ordinary. Others at work were the innovators, not him. Albert didn’t mind being pretty much like everyone else in his workplace, except in one respect. He knew that he was fiercely protective of his productivity. Albert wanted nothing less than to show up for work, accomplish as much as he could possibly accomplish in a day, and go home tired knowing he could have done no more. The only thing that truly frustrated him was when things interrupted his productivity at work. Why, after all, was he even at work, if not to be productive?
Productivity
Productivity is an employer’s concern, at first blush. To be productive means to complete at least as much of the work one’s employer has for one to do in an allotted time. Employers appreciate, value, and reward employees who are productive. As to employees who are not productive? Let’s just say employers generally regret having hired them. Employers may move non-productive employees into other roles where they can be more productive. Employers may alternatively move non-productive employees into informal or formal corrective action programs anticipating termination if they do not increase their productivity. Employers may also just let non-productive employees languish in their roles, satisfied for the time being that other workers are picking up the slack, even if those other workers don’t particularly appreciate having to do so. Whatever the options and outcomes, productivity is a peculiarly important parameter in many if not all workplaces. Consider carefully the job and career in which you are able and willing to be productive.
Commitment
Productivity, though, isn’t just important to the employer. Productivity is also important to the employee. Indeed, in many if not most workplaces where the employer expects some employees to be productive and others not so, an individual employee’s own productivity is more important to the individual employee than to the employer. To put it another way, you should care more about your productivity than your employer. To some degree, employees are fungible to employers. Employers just need someone to do the job. You, though, need to do the job for yourself as well as for your employer. Working where you know you’re not productive may earn you a paycheck but isn’t the full meaning and purpose of work. The productivity you miss hurts not just your employer but also you. Few things wither the soul as much as going through the motions without purpose, desire, and intention. Doing so may be necessary for a time. But doing so for an extended period wastes life, when we have precious few hours to live. Choose a job and career where you can be productive.
Desire
Your productivity can have a lot to do with your desire to sense that you are engaged in and by your work and, through your work, engaged in the greater world. Families engage their members. You can’t and wouldn’t want to avoid caring for your family members with whom you live. Yet your orbit of family concern and care can at times seem smaller than the full orbit of care and concern in which you could and should engage. Your productivity at work assures you that your interests and efforts are reaching broader communities. Those communities include your employer’s workforce, customers, clients, and suppliers, and all others who benefit directly or indirectly from your employer’s goods and services. Ask the recently retired, and some of them will tell you that the thing they miss most is that sense of productive participation in the larger concerns of the world. Recognize that need and desire within you, and then choose and pursue a career that most enables you to fulfill it.
Practices
The practices that make one productive can vary from field to field. Choose a career field in which the practices that you most consistently and competently engage in, with the least effort and greatest grace, are most productive. For instance, you may lean naturally toward maintaining a compulsive sense of order, shutting doors and turning off lights that others leave on and open, picking up and putting away tools and throwing away trash that others leave behind, and constantly ensuring that everything is in its place. Well, then become a manager, administrator, inspector, facilities superintendent, or chief custodian, or even a copy editor or programmer, all roles that can require a high degree of compulsive attention to detail. Or you may instead lean naturally toward starting interesting new things without necessarily finishing them. Well, then join a team of product and program developers. Know thyself, and choose a career and field, or role within your career and field, that comports with thine own practices and preferences. Why fight your own nature? Instead, put it to work.
Demonstration
Productivity, like skill, isn’t something you claim. Productivity, like skill, is instead something you demonstrate. If you can’t give examples of your productivity, you’re probably not truly productive. Examine your examples of productivity for the things those examples can tell you about yourself. You don’t have to have been productive on the job yet. You might have been productive in school or a recreational pursuit or hobby. Look at some of the crazy things you do outside of work to the point of exhaustion, whether those things involve collecting, shopping, hunting, fishing, traveling, running, swimming, canoeing, or you name it. If you’ve nearly made a career out of a hobby or recreation, that thing may tell you something about your best career. You wouldn’t be the first to turn a hobby into an income and then a career.
Dedication
Productivity takes more than interest, passion, or obsession. Productivity can also require dedication to one’s technique, skill, or craft. Some of us just like doing something, the same thing, over and over. You know how, as a kid, you discovered something that both occupied and calmed you, like repeatedly throwing a ball against a wall and catching it on the rebound? Thump, thump, thump, until it drove your mom, dad, or sibling crazy, all hours of the summer daytimes and evenings? Repetitive motions can have their hypnotizing effect. And they’re not purely mindless. Rather, to do some job tasks well, repeatedly and productively, one must continually refine one’s attention and technique. And it’s often the attention and concentration those repeated tasks require that give them their engaging and calming effect. We’re made to concentrate and act, anticipating a positive result. We’re made for productivity. What most draws your mental attention and physical energy into a soothing, even if challenging and tiring, pattern? Find that career, and you’ll be engaged, satisfied, and productive. Your work may even become soothing play.
Purpose
We all sometimes feel like we’re only a small cog in a big commercial wheel that, while productive, steals the life and crushes the souls of its workers. That’s not at all what this chapter is trying to facilitate or encourage. Just the opposite: you should be choosing careers, jobs, roles, and employers that give you and others life, rather than steal life. Productivity isn’t the soul crusher, at least not when aimed toward the right purposes. You may be quite good at any number of things that are frankly not worthwhile or, worse, are frankly destructive. Those distortions of good and corruptions of person are not productive in the correct sense of that word. Too many employers recruit, train, employ, and compensate employees to run schemes and scams that do nothing but degrade communities and commerce. If you begin to sense that you are in one of those rackets, get out now. Run for your life. Find a new career. Productivity in its true sense doesn’t mean keeping busy making a mess of others’ lives. Productivity in its true sense means working to redeem, not increase, the distortions and corruptions of the world.
Journal
Title My Productivity the next section of your Career Journal, after the section on My Creativity. In your productivity section, describe the sense of commitment you have to wanting to be engaged and efficacious in the world, of wanting to make a daily difference. Describe how strong that desire is and where it tends to lead you. Give examples, if you can, of when you did more of a thing than anyone around you, whether in a work setting or outside of work, tending to show your capacity, commitment, ability, and interest. Describe where you find yourself being especially dedicated to a skill or craft. Then, describe what you perceive to be true of your own nature, habits, and practices, as those attributes may relate to productive career or field roles. Based on your assessment of your own natural tendencies, discern and describe the roles in which you might be most naturally productive.
Key Points
Your ability to consistently do what an employer requires matters.
Productivity matters not only to employers but also to employees.
Find a job and career that keeps you engaged and productive.
Align your job and career with what you naturally do a lot.
Examine where you’ve been productive for clues to your best role.
Take roles where you can dedicate yourself to refining techniques.
Ensure that you dedicate your productivity to beneficial purposes.