Don’t waste your money on productivity apps…
OK, don’t part with your money until……
You may often find yourself signing up for trials of the next “new” app to “help” with productivity, to streamline your work and generally assist you in getting stuff done.
So many excellent apps for note-taking, organising, scheduling, planning, management and the zen of modern living, it’s a veritable smorgasbord of offerings every month.
But you never find the right one, the “nirvana” of a solution that fits you.
You never quite find THE convergence point that tips you into being the most productive human being in the world…well, newsflash.
NO PRODUCTIVITY APP WILL IMPROVE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO BE PRODUCTIVE WITH.
They all require a few basic ingredients to be in place to be of any use whatsoever.
You will NEVER find that perfect app until you have the right ingredients to utilise the perfect application, and those ingredients can be elusive.
What are productivity apps actually for?
Over the last 10 years, there has been a massive rise in new approaches to the age-old problem of maximising personal productivity. It’s like we have as a global society stepped onto a treadmill and rather than slow down or get off the wheel going nowhere, we look for ways to increase the speed at which we run, without heed to the inputs required to make running efficacious or beneficial to us or the world.
The rise of productivity apps has aligned itself (or maybe driven) the impetus to always be DOING something, having a hustle, and generating the next big thing. All whilst juggling work, life, relationships, well-being, reading, writing, hoping, dreaming, scheming and plotting.
That’s a lot of effort on a big wheel.
In simple terms, a productivity app is there to help you achieve something by being an adaptable assistant to the tasks needed to reach a goal. Be it reminders, lists, outlines or timelines, productivity apps try to bring these things together (and a few other neat tricks) in new or adaptable ways wherein the unintended consequence is often that we spend so much time making our productivity app work the way we do, to look the way we want it that we actually lose time and reduce our personal productivity in the course of chasing productivity nirvana.
So many hustles, projects and ideas that we feel we need to act onNOW lest someone else get a jump on us and “steal” our success. We spread ourselves very thinly across a range of things never achieving the goal for which we strive.
The two magic ingredients needed for productivity.
And so we come to the point of all of this, that there IS no point if you don’t possess the DRIVE to get things done, the FOCUS to achieve them, so ingredient one has to be the DETERMINATION to get stuff done. No productivity app is going to help with that, it comes from within. If you are lazy then no amount of productivity apps are going to magically transform you into not lazy, not motivated or not driven, they will just help you organise your lack of those.
Ingredient number two is a little bit more personal. I like to read, a lot. I LOVE audio books because I know I can get easily distracted by other things when I am leafing through a book. I love videos that explain AI, Quantum Physics, I love hearing about the early days of computer manufacturing in the 80s because they all combine to give me inspiration. The seed of inspiration is learning and learning fires up your creative neurons, learning generates intellectual hunger and movement, and learning allows you to germinate ideas that sometimes you didn’t know you had.
If you sit in your room playing Call of Duty all day, you will be uninspired, but if you immerse yourself in the lessons of the world then your creativity will come to the fore. To that end, I argue that ingredient two is CREATIVITY.
You won’t do the next best thing, you won’t achieve something you have not achieved before if you don’t nurture your creativity if you don’t surround yourselves with people, stories, tools and teams that inspire you to do greater things, that give you courage, hunger and a desire to build something.
An added extra
None of this is to rip on productivity apps, far from it. I use NOTION myself and I find it invaluable as a tool to collect, collate, organise and EXECUTE my ideas.
That’s the icing on the cake — EXECUTION. It’s great having ideas, and it’s great having devised a plan but it matters not a jot if you don’t execute your plan.
Productivity apps are NO USE to you if you don’t have the DETERMINATION, the CREATIVITY and the EXECUTION in place.
Using productivity apps without those is like buying a new computer expecting it to make you a better programmer, or a faster car to make you a better river — it starts from within, not from without.
What do you think and, what productivity apps do you USE to deliver results?
