Part 12 — Coping with Your Hunger for Capacity
Why productivity enthusiast aren’t satisfied “managing just so many tasks but no more”.
Problem
You’re a top performer who is a lifelong learner; someone who sees a future of personal growth. But you seem to be like a hamster on a treadmill. The last improvement you made to your task management wasn’t enough and you’re not sure why. Neither was the one before. Why don’t your improvements endure forever? Why do you care so much about getting better in this area when the average person doesn’t?
In a prior article (#8) in this series, we established that there’s always a limit to your ability to manage tasks effectively. In other words, even if you are insanely productive, an invisible cap exists. Whenever you attempt to add more tasks beyond the limit, you instantly experience unwanted symptoms. It’s as if there’s always a camel’s back waiting to be broken.
You may be lured into the belief that human beings should find and settle down to their current level of task performance, and forget about further improvements. But this doesn’t match my observation of trainees and coachees. They always want more. And maybe it applies to you, given that you have read this far.
But why do you keep tempting fate by adding one more straw to your camel’s back? And then another? Why does the realization that the camel’s back has gotten a bit stronger make you look forward to increasing the load?
Is this bad? Should you stop?
Well…join the club. My research shows you and other productivity enthusiasts have an unquenchable appetite for more tasks. Consequently, as soon as you find a way to increase your capacity, you can’t help yourself…you add more tasks.
If you’re lucky, you discover that your appetite grows more slowly than your capacity increases. Most experience the opposite. Why? Too many productivity enthusiasts are high-performers or Type A personalities.
Why is this important?
Understanding this innate tendency can be freeing. It’s just part of your nature…a good thing.
As you drive for amazing results, it’s natural to wish to increase your capacity to manage tasks.
So…you can relax and commit to a career of steady improvements. You can also know that unwanted symptoms are not a sign of failure, but a signal that alerts you to the need to increase capacity.
What’s the Link to the Rapid Assessment Program?
Without a systematic way to make improvements, this continuous demand for improvement sometimes becomes stressful. In the worse case, you could feel trapped in a dead-end. However, the Rapid Assessment Program is one way to figure out the best improvements to make at any point in time.
This means you can accept your true nature; your tendency to increase task volume so that it nears the upper limits. And you can embrace the fact that continuous improvements are the price you pay for being a driven human being. This is a game you have unwittingly played for years. Making it conscious should make you a better player.
Find out more about the MyTimeDesign Rapid Assessment Program in this webinar.
Part 12 — Coping with Your Hunger for Capacity was originally published in 2Time Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.