What is Mindful Productivity?

Mindful Productivity is intention and awareness of your current mental state, energy capacity, and external demands that help you better manage how you take action in the present moment to get things done sustainably. 

In other words, Mindful Productivity is sustainable action guided by the conscious awareness of one’s mental load, energy capacity, and humanness.

This feels futuristic to say, but we have to remember that as humans, we operate under the human condition. 

There are many computers, apps, systems, automation, and more being created every day that can work in streamlined ways bypassing emotion, grief, human experience, distraction, life demands, and hunger.

What it means to be productive as a human is far different from many of the definitions we see of productivity.

It may be obvious to say but humans are not machines.

Our capacity is not simply dictated by how much sleep we get and what we had for breakfast. We are a complex system of neural pathways affected by hormones, social interactions, and energy drainers that take the form of social media posts, offspring, pets, spouses, and other endless responsibilities.

I point this out to remind you that the ways in which we idealize productivity often omit the very person who does the production: the human. You.

Mindful Productivity brings us back to a more sustainable form of getting things done.

By putting your well-being at the front of your creative work, you create a systemic form of self-care and self-awareness that can help you avoid burnout, work resentment, and poor quality outcomes.

So what does mindful productivity look like in simpler terms?

Mindful Productivity means you take action from a place of internal awareness of capacity vs. only focusing on the end goal. 

For example, if you knew you wanted to harvest 1000 apples by the end of the year from your backyard orchard, you could plant as many apple trees as would fit into your yard (much time the time-stuffing we do with our own schedules).

Or you could figure out what kind of tree usually produces anywhere from 100-200 apples, plant 10 trees, and make sure you have the best soil available to meet their needs. 

It’s also important to understand the difference between production and productivity, in other words, what you produce vs. what a productive day actually looks like.

In agriculture, for example, production can be measured in the net produce a given crop produces in a given time frame, say annually. While productivity, in this case, would refer to the rate of production - how many apples are harvested within a given day perhaps during harvest season?

Noting these differences is important and the agricultural example will fair well here for this next reason I’m about to describe.

We all know that apple trees don’t produce apples every day all year round. Seeds have to be planted, trees have to grow, seasons take place with various weather and soil conditions and eventually apples grow on trees that can be picked for a duration of time. 

Depending on the type of produce, the environment, the soil, and other conditions, some trees may produce more apples than others. 

As we all know, there are also trees that produce better quality apples, bigger apples, or different types of apples.

If you haven’t already rushed away from this article to go bake yourself an apple pie, let’s bring this all back home to how our productivity as humans share similar traits.

Let’s say you’re a seasoned writer and you make your income off of books you write and blog posts you publish online. 

You’re most likely aware of the steps you need to take to write efficiently and effectively. You’ve probably written articles that have done better than others in terms of page views, shares, or revenue in your pocket.

You probably also couldn’t write the same way or at the same efficiency 365 days out of the year even if you went to bed at the exact same time each night and ate the same thing for breakfast each morning.

Mindful Productivity gives us permission as humans to tap into the awareness of what keeps us productive and how we manage our energy levels to keep harvesting those apples every year.

If your goal is to write a new book each year then it becomes less about how productive you are each minute of every day and more so about when you write the highest quality content effectively.

Knowing how you work best, what drains your energy, and what creatively drives you will allow you to create a sustainable practice to write that amazing book in your brain. 

A project, based on mindful productivity principles would then look like this:

By focusing on the process of how you can best manage your energy levels (mental, emotional, and physical), you can then reach your desired outcomes by only working when you’ll deliver the best output for the goals you’re seeking.

This also means that you bring key components of mindful awareness into your regular work cycle. 

These can be attitudes that encompass an awareness of the present moment you’re in, but also the present circumstances of society at large such as how social justice issues, environmental awareness, and systemic biases impact both individuals and the collective at large.

The mindful part of mindful productivity means that you are checking in with yourself, your breathing, your mental health, your human experiences that impact your mood, your nourishment, and your overall desire for joy, happiness, and sustainability.

Productivity then evolves into not only the outcomes of a given project but the improvement and wellbeing of the person behind the project as they work toward that very goal.

Mindful Productivity isn’t any one thing for all individuals. Even in the diagram I’ve created above, every unique person will have various needs, circumstances, and a neurological framework that will require unique awareness, activities, and ways of taking sustainable action.

The goal of Mindful Productivity is to help individuals, teams, organizations, creatives, entrepreneurs, and communities grow in a way that not only brings impact with their outcomes but drives the betterment of humans as an objective.

Learn more about practical ways to implement Mindful Productivity into your daily life both personally and in your business by listening to the Mindful Productivity Podcast with new episodes dropping every Monday.

Written by Sarah Steckler