If you’ve ever had a health challenge affect your productivity, you can probably relate to how frustrating it was for me during my thyroid cancer healing journey. While you don’t need to have perfect health to lead a productive life, you at least need to be in good enough health for your body and mind to carry out your glorious will on earth.
Back when I was twenty-nine years old, I felt like I was going on eighty-nine because everything gave me gas, made me tired, or caused me aches and pains. Forget building a business, writing, or starting a family, I was too busy figuring out to be twenty-nine again.
I shifted all my time, energy, and money towards this goal because, for the first time in my life, I couldn’t get anything done because of my health. I had barely enough energy and focus to keep my room clean and feed myself, let alone think about my far-away hopes and dreams.
The First Signs of Health Compromise
I truly believe that loss of productivity is one of the first clues that something may be amiss in your health. Not your lab work, not your scans, but your ability to get things done.
When this is the case, Getting Things Done and up-leveling your organizational or time management skills just become a distraction for addressing the root cause of what’s amiss - that your human instruments, aka the mind and body, may be compromised in their abilities to effectively turn life’s inputs into your outputs.
Restoring Productive Potential
The first step to restoring productivity is to increase Productive Potential. Using degraded soil as an analogy, repleting soil health through rest, water, fertilizer, sunlight, and positive intentions will then restore the soil’s potential to produce an abundant harvest. As you can see, health is Productive Potential.
Despite that being a crappy time in my life, that crap gifted me time, stillness, and healing to fertilize my metaphorical garden of health. With my health growing, my Productive Potential grew as well.
Then at some point, it was definitely time to turn my productive potential into something tangible for the world. Any more fertilizing my metaphorical garden soil of health and I would be left with a pile of metaphorical poo.
And that’s where I am now and what I want for others - to help them overcome their health challenges so that they can access their productive potential and to be productive once more.
To end, I’d love to know, “What’s your biggest challenge to your productivity?”
Thanks for sharing Maymie. Productivity goes well when life goes on its expected trajectory. But when there's a spanner in the works of life events, then productivity takes a back seat.