Planners vs. Doers: Discovering Your Productivity Personality

Well, hey there. Welcome back. It takes a lot to keep coming back like this. And that’s actually what we’re going to talk about today. So, let me ask you this to hook you in the beginning. So, is there something that you do that you are kind of keeping tally on? Like it’s been X amount of days that you’ve done this. Like you go on a diet or you quit smoking or you’re trying to give up a a habit or you’re trying to develop a good habit where you say, look, I’ve gone to the gym, you know, every other day for the last month? I’ve kept my desk at work, really tidy, I keep my email box under X amount of emails and if you do your crazy, that’s just I don’t know how you do that.

How Modern Apps and Games Hook Our Brains

Or maybe your desire to keep a streak going is basically relegated to games. Maybe you have a game you, I don’t know, Candy Crush or one of those things, you kids are playing on your phones. You know what I mean. You may have some sort of game that you’re maintaining a streak. Or even you’re using a a language program that says, good job, you’ve maintained your streak. There’s a specific psychology to streaks and maintaining one, just like there is a specific psychology to collecting things. And many companies and games worth billions of dollars capitalize on those two facets of our psychology.

Building an App and Breaking a 221-Day Streak

I know this because I’m attempting to do the same on the software that I created called Checkmark, which is basically a to-do list that capitalizes on you maintaining a streak of doing at least one thing each day. And then I capitalize on the psychology of collecting things by offering you collectible badges for accomplishments, like you check off something really late at night so now you get the Night Owl badge and stuff like that. I am not bringing this up in any way to try to get you to try Checkmark. I’m bringing this up because I failed miserably.

So, I was maintaining a streak, and again, a streak is simply you check at least one thing off every day, and I had to write all this complex stuff to track that properly and so forth, and you would get a little flame on the top of your screen that would count how many days you were maintaining a streak. So if every day for the last week you checked at least one thing off, now you’re at seven, and the next day is eight, and nine, and ten. But if you get through the entire day tomorrow and forget to check something off, boom, your streak resets to zero. Well, I maintained a streak of 221 days, and then one day, I lost it.

The Shift From Changing Behavior to Just Logging It

I was I was I I was a little taken aback because I had I had accomplished two of the things on there, but I simply hadn’t open it up and checked them off. And having the power to go and manipulate databases would have allowed me to just say, oh, come on, Mark, here you go. But I didn’t. I thought, I’m going to be just like the other users of it and take my lumps because that’s the way this should work. And the interesting thing is it sort of changed me. It sort of changed my concept of how I used it.

Because I was checking things off partially because I wanted to check something off. And you know, that’s a little bit of your old dopamine hit. But after I got through that loss, I kinda didn’t care about maintaining a streak anymore. I still cared about checking things off, I still cared about being productive, but I didn’t care if for some reason I didn’t check it off. Now, I had already had a very avid user of this who sang the praises to me and had a pretty complex professional life who had told me that he doesn’t care about streaks. He never did. And I had talked to him about streaks and he had like a seven-day streak one one time and that was it, he never got past that, and it was just because of the way he used it.

So now I was kinda in this mindset where a streak didn’t really matter. Did losing my streak change my desire to get things done? No. But it sort of changed my relationship with the way I recorded it. So the streak wasn’t propelling me to make sure I was productive. The streak was propelling me to make sure I recorded it. That’s a big difference.

Two Completely Different Ways to Look at a To-Do List

And upon reflection, it makes me think about people, including myself, who sometimes do things, rather elaborate, enormous, productive things, and don’t really check it off. Meaning, they don’t really write it down, they don’t really think about it. One day, they’ll just become super productive. They’ll get all the yard work done, they’ll get a bunch of projects done, they’ll get a bunch of stuff done. And they won’t even think about it. It’s not like they had, hey, I had a honey-do list for myself or or or for my wife or what have you, and I got all this stuff done and I was finally able to check that off. They mentally checked it off because now they knew they had needed to do it anymore, but they didn’t do it so that they could check it off.

Do you understand the nuance there? One’s one’s the reverse of the other. One of them says, I have the thing to do, I better go do that so that it’s not on this list anymore. And the other one is, I have a thing to do, I’m going to do it. Oh, now that I did it, it’s not on the list. Does that even make any sense? I hope it does.

What Is Your Productivity Personality?

Understanding nuance of what I just said can help you understand the nuance of your productivity personality. Oh, I just made that up and I’m gonna write that down. Yes, it’ll be the next book. I’m kidding. But if you understand your productivity personality, it can help you to well motivate yourself, right? I mean, when it comes to certain things, and you know, we can go back to my book Because about monsters and unicorns and how they’re always there motivating you. But in this case, I’m just saying the simple motivation of to be or not to be, to do or not to do.

Because the former treats the, well, let me say it this way: the former makes you treat yourself like a second person, like a third, like a third person almost, and the latter just shoves you into the driver’s seat and says, I’m just going to do this. And let me explain what that means. So the former is saying, hey, future Mark, do this thing. I have a list I want you to do. So you’re sort of like two people. I gotta make myself do this, I’m lazy, I’m going to do this, okay, I’m setting myself up for this. And the other one just says, okay, I’m in control, I’m cognitive, what do I need to do? I’m just going to do this. And yeah, I’m not writing it down somewhere, I’m not checking it off, I just need to do this.

So, the latter is more present in the moment, but the former is more of a planner. It’s more logistics. And as you can imagine, both of these have strengths and weaknesses. And it’s no shock that you may flip between these. If you stick to one of these too long, it may cause some issues for you. You you may even have a spouse that says, you know, you don’t have to constantly be planning stuff, can we just figure out what we’re going to do tomorrow? Well, let’s write it down today. Oh no, I don’t want to write it down today, honey. Let’s can we play it by ear? Oh, I don’t like playing things by ear. Well, then you’re the former. You are, you know, your productivity personality is one that says, I need to have my checkmarks here.

If you’re more of the latter, then you’re somebody who feels constrained by that sort of thing. You may even feel constrained by your job. You may even bump into things when it comes to procedure manuals and things like that because you’re like, well no, I’ll know what to do when I get there. You see how that sounds just as dangerous as the other one, and that’s why you sometimes have to flip back and forth based on a case-by-case basis.

When Logistics Clash With Real Life

So, what do we do? Now that we’re in the awareness portion of the podcast, well, just be aware of this and figure out which one you are, and if it’s situational, and understand the benefits of either. I think if it, I think if it helps, there are a lot of people who spend their week being the former, meaning they’re in planning phase, and then for the weekend, they’re like, oh, it’s Saturday, I’m just not going to think. Or they save all that up and they go on their vacation.

And unfortunately, they may be married to a spouse that wants to plan vacation, that wants to say, every single day we’re going to get up at seven and we’re going to do this and this and this and this and this. And if they say, well, I’m on vacation, that may not land very well with their spouse. You’re on vacation and now you just want to waste it laying around? The the person isn’t laying around. The person is now living in the moment that they are not necessarily allowed to live in during the week because they are busy trading their time and energy so that they can bring resources home and put food on the table.

I hope this made a lot of sense. I hope my failure has allowed you to understand something. I’ll be happy to get right on that and continue to do so. So, take care of yourself, know that you are important, and I appreciate every person who listens to this. Thank you.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS