Why Self-Awareness is Critical for Productivity
A big part of emotional intelligence is self-awareness, and a big part of self-awareness is knowing when you’re most productive. What’s more, your state of productivity constantly shifts as your interest level shifts.
When you’re bored, you’re easily distracted. When something productive comes to your attention you’re productive, when something irrelevant comes to your attention you aren’t. In other words, when you’re bored your focus shifts to whatever the next thing is. So, it’s no surprise that being bored is bad for productivity.
As your mind moves out of a state of boredom to a state of interest your focus narrows. When your focus narrows, nothing easily distracts you. Your interest causes your mind to filter out anything that’s not relevant. In addition, as your interest increases the intensity of your focus also increases. This increase in intensity helps you become more productive and get better at filtering out distractions. But this is only helpful to a point.
Just as boredom is bad for productivity, too much focus is also bad for productivity. Too much focus turns into tunnel vision. Tunnel vision causes you to ignore too much information and lose sight of opportunities and threats. As a result, tunnel vision can cause a steep decrease in productivity.
The goal is to find a balance between boredom and interest as well as apathy and intensity. This point of balance is different for everyone. This is ultimately why self-awareness is critically important for productivity. Only you can know how to find your unique point of balance to be at your optimal level of productivity. Without being self-aware, you are leaving your productivity to luck and as the saying goes, luck is not a strategy.