What does "a productive day" mean to you?

I´ve realized I frequently judge how well my day went based on how productive it was... Or rather, on how productive I was. Does this sound familiar?

Productivity is a topic I´ve always been interested in; in fact, it´s what first brought me to the personal development world. I remember the old times when I used to search for tips and strategies to stay on top of my never-ending to-do list. And I did find a few tools that helped me, but only to a certain extent.

Because in reality, what was happening to me was much more complex than I thought. As it's usually the case.

That´s why in coaching we like probing and digging a bit beneath the surface, because often times the "problem" our client is coming with is just a symptom of a deeper conflict or imbalance, which they themselves are unaware of. For example, time management issues tend to reflect underlying priority management issues, and procrastination may be caused by conflicting values or priorities.

A widely used coaching technique consists of asking questions like the one at the beginning of this article: "What does X mean to you?" This may seem silly, but at the end of the day, words are symbols we use to represent things, and when we´re discussing relatively abstract terms, our thoughts are much more complex than the words we use to describe them. Breaking down the word´s meaning and explaining it out loud (or in writing) can help us to make very interesting discoveries.

For example, the concept of productivity is linked to the action of "producing", and I´ve realized I used to believe that a person could only be productive when they were "producing" something tangible, something measurable. When I started my professional career, first as a programmer and later on as a systems analyst, it was easy for me to determine whether I was being productive or not, for I had documents, diagrams and lines of code as proof. Then as I progressed to a different kind of role, the game rules suddenly changed: there were more meetings and less defined tasks, and I found myself a bit lost; very often I would get to the end of the day with a feeling of not having contributed at all.

Then slowly but surely, I started adapting and evolving my definition of productivity. It took me years to get rid of the idea that the time I spent "chatting with people" (= at meetings, especially 1:1s) didn't count as work, because I wasn't producing anything. Now I know that talking to my colleagues and fostering work relationships not only it's not a waste of time, it's actually an essential part of my job, and it makes a huge difference in terms of pushing projects forward. Now that I know the transformational power of a good conversation, it's one of the things I enjoy the most.

And what about outside of work? Well, I've realized that this constant need to produce has a lot of weight in my personal life as well, so I still find it difficult to prioritize rest, leisure and self-care at the same level of importance as other things that "must be done". Without even noticing, I fill up my evenings and weekends with tasks to be completed, so that at bedtime I can say it was a productive day... But the good news is that now I'm aware of it, and I'm working on balancing it out, also being careful not to fall into the guilt trap.

What do you think? Is productivity important to you? And how do you measure it?