The Curse of Low-Hanging Fruit

What habits are eating your productivity?

When my mother was fully retired from her secretarial job, after my father had been decease for five years or so, I saw something odd in mom’s daily activities.

I would fly Sky and I home to Colorado on Sky’s February school break so that we could get some time in the Rocky mountains and go skiing with Grandma. Because I wasn’t with her every day, I could observe changes in her behavior that I might not have noticed otherwise. It looked to me like mom was preoccupied with doing tiny loads of laundry throughout the day. Was this some kind of OCD thing? I wouldn’t know. But I realized that this ritual had taken over her time and focus to a degree that was costing her connection time with friends and with Sky and me. What was going on?

Mom passed away several years ago, but I know that she and I shared an internal drive to be constantly productive. At any one juncture, I have several projects going in various states of incompletion. Many get completed eventually - like my book and the work I do with clients. And then there are those that fall off the table - like the Family Cookbook Project I just can’t seem to complete.

However, watching my mother spend time and energy doing laundry primarily to simply feel productive caused me to bump up against an uncomfortable question: Where was I wasting time focusing on the “low-hanging fruit”?

This term means the stuff that is easy and pretty mindless to complete. For me - it’s decluttering my workspace, doing dishes, sorting and filing emails. For you it might be something completely different, but I bet you’ll know it when you become aware of it. It’s like junk food in that it makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something…when really - it’s just eaten up the majority of your productivity time.

I’l dig into this topic more deeply next week, as I spent three days recently in a workshop that taught me, painfully, how this low hanging fruit problem has impacted my financials and my business. Ouch.
But, as Seth Godin says: tension (and pain) is what happens right before we grow…