A Productive Kind of Lazy? Taking time to celebrate our accomplishments

I love to cross things off my to do list.  When I’m getting something done, it feels good.  Like most of us, I’ve been taught that success comes from hard work.  Our culture has a great disdain for laziness, which translates to “not doing.”  So as soon as I finish one thing, I’m feeling anxious to start on the next.

This helps explain our addiction to multitasking.  If we can do more than one thing at a time, we think we’ll have more success faster.   Yet, as all the research shows, multitasking is really task-switching, which is inefficient and actually hurts our productivity.

This “doing” mentality also leaves no time for celebrating and savoring our accomplishments.  It’s ironic that taking a moment to reflect back on all the things we have done feels like a waste of time.  Yet this reflection builds our confidence and recharges our batteries because we can see our progress.  Constantly “doing” without pausing to appreciate our accomplishments can drain our internal resources and hurt our productivity.   It starts to feel like a nonstop cycle of busyness with no end in sight.

Pause right now.  What have you accomplished in the past 24 hrs?  It doesn’t have to be anything big.  Even reflecting on those small wins is important.

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Tina Hallis, Ph.D., is a professional speaker and founder of The Positive Edge, a company dedicated to helping individuals and organizations increase their positivity to improve the quality of people’s work lives and the quality of company cultures.