Maximize Your Ouput With A Few Simple Fixes

The other day, I begrudgingly bought a new pillow. My old one had become so flat that I had been sleeping with my arms underneath it to give my head and neck support. I should have purchased it months ago, but I had avoided it (really, for no good reason).

After a few nights of sleeping with the new pillow, I realized how much more comfortable I was! I was sleeping so well not having to try and finagle support from elsewhere that my neck actually felt rested in the morning. Why had I waited so long to feel better?

So often, we avoid things. Simple things that need to be resolved, and can be easily fixed. But instead, we do the dance of over-compensating for them. Repeatedly. Sometimes, these are big things. Sometimes, they are as simple as going to the store and buying a pillow, for a critical thing called sleep!

But we downplay, we de-prioritize, we tolerate.

These little hassles still take energy away from us every single day. They linger unnecessarily. From the broken clock, that every time we look at in disdain, we tell ourselves, “I need to get that fixed,” to the phone call that never gets made, despite being on to-do list every day.

These trivial annoyances create unintended baggage. Debilitating baggage that weighs us down and slowly wears us out mentally, like the battery chirping in the smoke detector at 3am every night, or even that interminable project that everyone knows is dead, but no one wants to explain to Senior Management.

And to make ourselves feel better, we devise excuse after excuse…I’m too busy. Not now. I’ll deal with it later. We prolong & delay. But if we just stopped avoiding and confronted the issue head-on, our lives would benefit from being less cluttered, and in turn, more productive.

To maximize output, we’ve got to stop letting our energy be stolen away by the all the minutiae. Because the longer they last, these “little things” siphon away more and more energy from our true focus and our real priorities.

So, vow to do it today. Here is a push, a guiding path, a 3-step action plan: (1) eradicate minor annoyances, (2) banish unwanted distractions, and (3) repair the smallest of items that bother you the most. Don’t procrastinate any longer. Fix something on your I-need-to-deal-with-this list. Once you can do this and move on, you will have much more time and space (in your mind) to focus on the goals that really matter!