Productivity is Like Cleaning a Dirty Plate

Let's be honest, none of us enjoy cleaning dirty pots, pans and plates... it is tiring, boring and annoying... but, whilst cleaning a plate last night, I discovered an important productivity lesson.

In fact, my productivity today has been extremely high.

If you are the sort of person that puts things off for tomorrow, this may be of use to you too.

I discovered that if I cleaned my plate directly after eating, the food and liquid on the plate was extremely easy to clean... infact, in most cases, it just glided off the plate effortlessly.

However, when I left the plate overnight and attempted to clean the following morning, the food had started to stick to the plate and become hard, thus meaning I had to scape and scrub.

On some occasions, I have left a plate for up to 5 days, and it was like removing cement, just one plate took 10 minutes of extremely hard work.

This is very similar to how tasks work in the human mind... you see, there is a scientific principle that says that a task multiplies in importance, due to the direct relation of the amount of time spent on it.

In other words, if you spend 5 months on a task, by the 5th month, it will appear vastly more important and large than it did 3 months earlier... thus leading to stress, extra effort, worry etc...

So in reality, by putting tasks off, we are making them seem more and more difficult to achieve... that is why putting off a task for one day, can often trigger a sequence whereby you dont complete the task for weeks... the longer you leave it, the harder it becomes.

So next time you are cleaning a plate, remember to go and do any tasks that you may have put off, otherwise, they will become unmanageable.

Dean & Barry