Don’t fall into the productivity trap.

Are you absolutely crucial to the success of your business? If the answer is a resounding yes, then your business might have a problem.

Here’s why: Your enterprise needs to be able to thrive without you. If you are the secret to its success, then you’re probably overworked, overstressed, and permanently logged on. Now, you might think that the solution to these problems is productivity. All you have to do is squeeze more work into less time. But working more isn’t a solution. It’s a trap.

The key message in this blink is: Don’t fall into the productivity trap.

Parkinson’s law states that our consumption of a resource expands to meet its supply. Set aside endless time to work, and you’ll use it. Sure, you can optimize that time through productivity. But what do you do with the time that productivity hacks free up? Bingo! You find more work to fill the extra time – and, just like that, you’ve fallen into the productivity trap.

You don’t want to be more productive. You want to achieve organizational efficiency, where your resources work in harmony, maximizing yield, and where you’re leveraging your team’s talents, and pinpointing and fulfilling key tasks instead of rushing through a to-do list at random.

In short, you should be aiming for targeted efficiency, not blanket productivity.

But you might encounter a significant roadblock: you. You’re human, after all, and humans are comforted by the familiar. Even if the hamster wheel of productivity is making you sick, the workaholic grind is familiar. It makes you feel like you’re doing your best.

But your workaholic habits are giving you tunnel vision. If you can’t take a break, you can easily find yourself in a cycle where you respond to what’s urgent instead of addressing what’s important: correcting small mistakes instead of meeting big-picture goals. Soon enough, your workday is spent putting out one fire after another, but none of these reactionary decisions are steering your business in the right direction.

You might feel comfortable stuck in overdrive. You might even feel it demonstrates your commitment to your business. But the truth is, it's holding you back.

The real solution here isn’t to work more. It’s to work less. More specifically, it’s to implement the systems that will enable you to work less. The next blinks will tell you exactly how to do that.