In today’s episode of Creating The Path, I’m talking about the 4 states of productivity.
This is something I posted on Instagram a couple of weeks ago. But I wanted to record this episode to dive a little deeper into these states of productivity. There's only so much information I can squeeze into an Instagram post.
So, let's get into it.
Listen On:
Topics discussed in this episode:
[00:30] An overview of the 4 states of productivity
[02:01] Productive and stressed
[04:11] Busy and stressed
[06:27] Busy and calm
[08:04] Calm and productive
[09:08] Redesign your schedule to align with your energy
[10:26] Episode recap
Resources:
Check the Instagram post about the 4 states of productivity here or head over to @heathergracehanson on Instagram.
Joyful Productivity VIP Day - If you're feeling overworked and overwhelmed, I can help you create a plan that allows you to be more productive while working less. After one day together, you'll have a schedule that allows you to work fewer hours, by managing both your time and energy and the foundation to support your success. More info here: https://www.heathergracehanson.com/vipday
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Noteworthy Quotes:
“Obviously, it's not ideal to be stressed. But it's natural and it's going to happen sometimes.”
“You want to be aware of where you are within these four quadrants and be intentional about that.”
“It's good to get advice, especially when you're starting out. But it's easy to fall into the cycle of listening to too many people and switching between different strategies to quickly.”
“There's nothing wrong with being content and happy where you are currently.”
“This productive and calm state is such a revolutionary way of working, especially if you've spent a lot of time in the opposite state, busy and stressed.”
Summary of the Podcast:
Creating the Path is a podcast that challenges multi-passionate entrepreneurs to achieve their goals by working less and eliminating overwhelm, so they can create their own unique pathway to a life they love. My mission is to transform hustle culture and assist others to shift away from living life on auto-pilot to living intentionally and following your own path to a life you love instead.
Host Bio:
Heather Grace Hanson is a certified positive psychology-based coach and creator of the Intentional Energy Framework, a system that empowers you to create a life and business you love without burning out. Heather is obsessed with all things personal development, running and walking in the park, interior design, salsa dancing and most importantly, spending time with her pup, Barclay.
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Creating the Path, a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to create their own unique pathway to success and happiness. I’m your host, Heather Grace Hanson, and each week I’ll be sharing tips and strategies to help you create the path to a life you love. Let’s dive in.
Hey there, thanks for joining me! Today I’m talking about the 4 States of Productivity. This is expanding on something I posted on Instagram a couple weeks ago, so this may sound familiar if you saw that post. I wanted to record this episode though, because I thought it was worth diving into a little deeper because there’s only so much information you can squeeze into an Instagram post.
So I posted an image with a vertical line and horizontal line crossing through it to create 4 different quadrants. On the vertical line, the top represents calm and the bottom represents stress. On the horizontal line, the left represents busy and the right represents productive.
And that’s how we get these 4 states of productivity: starting at the lower left and going clockwise, we start with productive and stressed, then busy and stressed on the lower left, moving up to busy and calm in the upper left, and lastly we have productive and calm in the upper right.
And I’ll make sure to post the link to my Instagram post in the show notes in case you want to see the visual, but I’ll talk through it right now.
Let’s start with the Lower right quadrant, which is Productive and Stressed
This is where you’re doing the work that moves the needle forward in your business but you're working too much, to the point where maybe it's affecting your health or maybe you're starting to feel like you're getting burned out.
I think that sometimes it’s ok to spend short amounts of time in this quadrant, because it’s natural to have different seasons in your business where sometimes you’re busier than others.
Like maybe if you have a launch, you might be in this Productive and Stressed quadrant during your launch, and that’s ok. The key is to make sure you don’t stay there until you burnout.
This is where awareness and intention come into play. You want to be aware of where you are in this quadrant and be intentional about that.
You can be intentional about times when you work more or less, and in order to do that, you need to be aware of where you are and where you want to be ideally and why and when you want to adjust how much or how hard you’re working.
The danger of spending too much time in this quadrant, is, as I mentioned, that you could burnout, but also, the more time you spend in this state of being productive and stressed and working a lot, you start to get more and more tired and overwhelmed over time, which eventually leads to you becoming less productive and then all of a sudden, you can find yourself in the next quadrant, on the lower left.
That’s the Busy and Stressed quadrant. This is where you’re doing all the little things that don't move the needle in your business. They don't really move you forward. This is the quadrant where you feel like you're in a hamster wheel. You're like, "Why am I not getting any results? I'm working ALL THE TIME."
This is the quadrant we most often find ourselves in when we feel stressed and overworked.
As I mentioned, sometimes you can slide into this quadrant from the other one, when you start out productive and lose that when you get too tired to be intentional or keep up with your planning and then you slip into doing the "busywork" instead of the important work.
Other times, you can just end up in this Busy and Stressed quadrant because you just don't know what you need to do to move your business forward.
So you might end up doing things that business coaches are telling you that you "should" be doing, which isn't necessarily bad, but it's easy to fall into the cycle of listening to too many people and switching between different strategies too quickly.
Maybe it's good advice, maybe it's not, but even if you're following good advice, you might be switching strategies too quickly to get traction.
So that's when you can end up on the hamster wheel of working all the time, yet feeling like you’re not actually moving forward.
So, moving up to the upper left quadrant. This is where you’re Busy and Calm.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this quadrant because you aren't stressed, and the only "problem" if you want to call it that, is that you aren't doing work that feels meaningful to you or that you aren't doing work that moves you forward. So if you're in this quadrant and you feel good and don't feel the need to change. Then there's no problem. I'm not going to tell you that you have to find work that's meaningful or that you have to have big ambitions. There’s nothing wrong with being content and happy where you are currently.
And like I mentioned earlier, you’ll likely have different seasons in your business, so even if you are an ambitious person, there might be seasons where you just want to stay where you are for a while, and intentionally not move forward, and that’s totally ok and normal.
When you are in a season of wanting to move forward though and grow your business, that’s when you likely want to be in the upper right quadrant, where you’re Calm and Productive.
This is the best productive state to be in if you want to grow your business and build a business or projects that are meaningful to you without sacrificing your health, your sanity, and just the overall quality of your life.
The key things about this quadrant is that you're managing both your time AND energy. And you're clear on what projects and tasks will move the needle and you cut out all the extra busywork. There will always likely be some admin stuff that you don't like doing, but that's planned for so that you can do it in as little time as possible so it doesn't expand to take up too much of your time and you can make a plan to automate as much of that work as possible to just get it off your plate
So if you’re realizing now that you want to be in the Productive and Calm quadrant and you’re currently in one of the other 3, I would love to chat with you to see if you’re a fit for my VIP day where I help you streamline your goals and plans and re-design your schedule to align with your energy so that you can get into this Productive and Calm state and stay there for as long as you want.. So if you want to chat about that, click the link in the show notes to apply and we can talk.
This Productive and Calm state is such a revolutionary way of working, especially if you’ve spent a lot of time in the opposite state, Busy and Stressed, which is really common.
When I started working this way and started managing my energy, and started letting go of the belief that I was "lazy" if I didn't work 40 hours or more each week, it felt like the world opened up to me. All of a sudden there was all this possibility, because I finally felt like I had true freedom. I didn't have to be trapped by my work.
Freedom is my number one values, so it always comes back to that for me.
So let’s do a quick recap of the 4 states of productivity:
Productive and Stressed
Busy and Stressed
Busy and Calm
Productive and Calm
I think Productive and Calm is a good place to try and be in most of the time, however, you can intentionally go into Productive and Stressed and Busy and Calm at different times depending on what season your business or your life is currently in.
The key is being able to create the awareness and flexibility for yourself to be able to be intentional around that.
And I think that’s a wrap for today. Goodbye for now, until next time.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Creating the Path as much as I did. Send me a DM on Instagram, @heathergracehanson to let me know what you think. But before you go, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. New episodes drop every Tuesday. I’ll see you then.