Grow Something!
Do you struggle with to organize and accomplish your most important tasks and goals, despite being busier than ever? Your productivity system is an evolving expression of the choices you make daily about how to live — and the person you’re becoming.
Unfortunately, all too often, mechanistic approaches to productivity don’t:
- Acknowledge individual differences.
- Differentiate tasks based on priority or time sensitivity.
- Help maintain a connection between values and priorities.
- Encourage balance across all the important parts of your life.
And reductionistic methods can easily relegate some of the most important things you do — like maintaining personal relationships, giving back or pursuing creative outlets — to mere “system outputs,” with no real sense of what matters most or how everything connects. In short, you miss the forest for the trees.
The result? Life lived on a hamster wheel — running faster and faster, but never getting where you want to go.
But what if your personal productivity system was less like a computer algorithm and more like a tree, whose nature is to mature and thrive, overcome challenging conditions and find a unique growth pattern all its own.
Such a tree would be rooted in your values — why you do. The roots would serve as guiding principles and feed all your efforts. Values like family, integrity and contribution would inform and guide your daily decisions. Even the tallest branches of that tree would be nourished by these root values.
The trunk of the tree would help it grow by giving strength and stability to the system, built from healthy and effective habits, rituals, routines and other sound practices that help translate values into daily actions and support progress and growth — how you do. The stronger the trunk, the more resilient the tree would be to weather life’s occasional storms.
A productivity tree would have different branches representing all the major areas of your life — such as physical and mental wellness, home, relationships, finances and professional development. And on those branches would be the results you produce through your system — the leaves — what you do.
The tree would change with the seasons of your life. There would be times when new branches sprout and leaves bud. And there would be times when growth slows to conserve energy for the next growing season. But even when the tree was bare, changes would occur below the surface as roots pushed deeper into the earth.
Trees waste nothing. Leaves that fall to the ground are broken down and reabsorbed to nourish future growth. Limbs may be lost over time, but new ones can grow in their place. All the lessons you learn along the way, all your successes and failures, are used. The full potential of the most majestic oak exists within the smallest acorn. We are meant to be magnificent specimens of our own creation — to reach our branches toward the sky. It is simply our nature. All that remains for us to do is foster healthy growing conditions.
That system is here and Branches Productivity is available now. Download the guide at no cost for a limited time and begin your journey toward balanced and healthy growth. And explore the rest of the Plant-based Productivity Blog, where you can find tips for all the branches of your life.
