Bees and Mosquitos Both Buzz Around, One gets Swatted and One Gets Applauded, Why?
Trying to figure how I am going to get that title into a Blog about Time Management ? it’s easy, whats the difference between being busy and being productive? How many days have you worked your butt off, but ended up at the end of the day feeling frustrated and stressed out?. Join the club of people who are busy, but are not productive, people like us, you and me, we work hard, but we are not focused, ( all of the time ) do not drive our own Agendas ( as often as we need to ) and end up letting other people, or other things, use up our time for their benefit.
You may recognized this theme, its one that I trot out every so often, especially on the days that I get side tracked myself, which is more often than I would like to admit. I always like to refer to Time Management as a journey, not a destination, when it comes to the self management part of Time Management, that is when the journey part comes in.
Bees are applauded because they are always swarming around, but they have a purpose and they have a specific task, which they do with great focus and vigor, we all can appreciate that single mindedness. Mosquitoes on the other hand, they are just buzzing around, mindlessly, no direction, no purpose, just a pain in the butt. I am not suggesting any of us are a pain in the butt, but on the days that I resemble a mosquito, those are the days that I work my butt off, but do not get that warm glow from putting in a good days work, where I actually accomplished some or all of my goals.
It s funny how new thoughts come into your head while you are working through some thing that you have done before, take this post for example, one thing that came to me is this, are we suppose to be able to accomplish our goals, EVERY single day?, does that make sense, is it even possible ? The short answer is no, its not possible, that’s why we always have the control over what we do, and with that control, have to be sure we give ourselves what I call ” white space days “. Days when we have reduced schedules, easier tasks, tasks and jobs that are not as demanding on us as others.
Back to the bees and the mosquito’s, being busy is harder work than being productive for one simple reason, when you are productive, you feel better at the end of the day, regardless of how hard you worked. Nothing beats the feeling of accomplishing something of value to ourselves, we set a goal, and we accomplished that goal, it may of been easy, or hard, but in the end, we triumphed. Proper Time Management gives you the tools to make succeeding much easier, not only easier, but it becomes the norm, instead of the exception.
Without trying to get too academic here, I need to point out that being busy does not preclude being productive, but simply being busy does mean your were also productive. In other words, just because you worked really hard, and were busy all day long, unfortunately does not necessarily reflect the quality of the work, nor even more unfortunately , the quantity of the work. In this case, we can not seem to catch a break, not only do we feel ripped off because we rushed around all day and did not manage to get much of anything of value done, we also suffered in the volume of work done, a double negative whammy.
What to take away from this post? Some days you can have quality and quantity, some days one or the other, and some days, you get zero, you get shut out. I really think the key is this, if you know starting out each day what the options are, you have a great chance of getting more doubles than splits, and then getting more singles than zeros, and at the end of all of that, you are significantly better off knowing this than the people who have no clue what the hell you and I are talking about 
Have a great evening, see you tomorrow.
Bryan Beckstead, Time Management, Time Management System
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