Why Don't We Do More?

It seems like a question that I ask myself all the time. Why did I just waste an hour when I could be working? Why did I just spend the whole day being busy and got nothing done? Why didn't I exercise today? Why? I read blogs about productivity, I read books about productivity, I build spreadsheets about productivity (nerdy yes, effective no), but I just never seem to hit the end of the day satisfied. I believe there are two reasons for this.

First is the issue of happiness and satisfaction. For this I will not say anything whatsoever, just link to a video that really blew my mind recently. There are two videos done by Barry, watch the one on choice. The second video on wisdom is very good as well (link is the title of this blog, the videos are on the right of the new screen)

The video and choice and thinking are all landmines in my mind however, compared to the real reason we don't do more. The real reason is that we do more, continuously we do more. We have more time to work, we have more money to spend, we have more food to eat, we have more of everything. We read more blogs, we create more content and on top of all of it we are in a continuous loop of trying to get it all done faster so we can fit more in. One of my favorite things about our construction group is that we work at a pace that I would consider frantic, just below total mayhem but way above working fast. There is this drive to work as fast as one person multiplied by however many people we have on the job site. It's almost therapeutic to work that hard because it forces you to tunnel in and only focus on what you are doing. My guess is that many people work this way all the time as well.

Ok, so you say "This post is garbage, I read the title and hoped to get more done and now I've read it and your telling me I'm already there, thanks for the mountains of help!". Here is where I hope I can help you. You do one hundred things today and they will all lay flat on the floor and create this newspaper covering that, while it may hide the carpet underneath, is really no monument to the day you just put in. Then tomorrow you get right back at it and lay another layer of newspaper but the problem is that you never get anywhere because the paper is so thin and your trying to build up to the ceiling of your dreams but that ceiling also rises with every given day. So we try to lay more paper down faster and we do but in the end it does not matter. It does not matter because we are not building anything.

If you are a fan of monopoly you know that the only way to win is to build up properties owned, take those properties and build houses, turn those houses into hotels and try and get whole sections owned to guarentee people stop on them and generate passive income for you. Yet in life we are simply trying to go around the board faster, to get a promotion so that we recieve $220 every time we pass go, all the while every time we come around the board there is something new waiting for us in the form of rent, bills, etc.

So reaching the conclusion, my question to both you and I today is are we just laying down newspaper instead of building something up, are we just trying to get more rolls of the dice in on any given day rather than getting our passive income together, are we getting more done each day but realizing that a marathon runner can run the fastest twenty six miles ever run but if it is on a treadmill it does not mean anything. Figure out what you are doing, figure out if it is a building block and then realize that if you only set up one building block per day you are way better of than laying down a hundred sheets of worthless newspaper.