Inside the Comfort Zone with Adam Kawalec

Get Things Done The Easy Way - Part Four

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Get Things Done The Easy Way - Part Four

💡 Learn why stress and busyness aren't true indicators of productivity and explore a new, easier way to get things done.

Adam Kawalec

May 21, 2024

Transcript

❓ Have you ever found yourself thinking that being overwhelmed and stressed is just a part of getting things done? Well … I just released the *finale* episode of our series "Get Things Done the Easy Way" on Inside The Comfort Zone, and this episode might very well help you finally change how you approach getting things done forever(?)

I challenge the misconception that feeling overwhelmed, busy, or stressed equates to productivity. Through this discussion, I reveal how these states often lead to procrastination and decreased effectiveness. Drawing on insights from influential figures such as Simon Sinek and studies by psychologists Alice Isen and Barbara Fredrickson, I illustrate how feeling good and staying within our comfort zone can boost creativity, problem-solving, and overall productivity. By enjoying what we do, we not only enhance our performance but also lead a more fulfilling and joyful life. This episode challenges the conventional belief that productivity requires stress and hard work.

(Keep reading for a written version of this podcast episode)

Main Takeaways:

The Power of Feeling Good: Understand why feeling good is not just nice but crucial for productivity.
Comfort Zone Benefits: Discover why staying in your comfort zone might actually boost your performance and creativity.
Scientific Backing: I shared some fascinating studies, including a 1970s experiment on mood and creativity, proving “feeling good” improves results.
Redefining Productivity: We're pushing against the old narrative that productivity means exhaustion. Find out how joy and ease can be your new benchmarks.

And here's a fun fact from the episode: Did you know that receiving a small gift, like a bag of sweets, can significantly improve your problem-solving skills? Indeed! In a classic study, participants who got some sweets solved a tricky candle problem much faster than those who didn’t. 🍬 Listen to the episode to find out more!

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🙏 Your Participation Counts

I would absolutely love to hear from you. Share your thoughts, insights, or even your results from the exercise in the comment section or through a private DM. Maybe the episode sparked a new idea, or you have a story to share about how shifting your focus has transformed your productivity. I encourage you to hit reply and let me know your thoughts. Your input could shape our future episodes!

What About Goals, Performance Or Productivity?

Is feeling overwhelmed good for getting things done? When we believe that the feeling of overwhelm, business or even stress is a sign of productivity and getting things done then you’ll struggle with letting yourself experience more ease throughout the day. Because, when you value being productive then you won’t feel comfortable when you’re not being productive.

However, overwhelm, busyness and stress are not really true indicators of productivity. As I mentioned before in this series of episodes, that distraction is an escape from discomfort, and overwhelm is typically uncomfortable. The other thing is that overwhelm typically leads to procrastination, which again is a result of getting distracted in the first place.

So when we aim to get things done, being overwhelmed or stressed, it might actually NOT be the experience we want to have while doing things, when there’s a high risk that it leads to us getting distracted. Overwhelm or busyness seldom feels very nice. By their very nature, these feelings or experiences are there to generate a sense of urgency with the goal to speed things up and hurry things along. This experience of being in a state of urgency and a constant hurry might lead to you feeling stressed. And over time, living under constant stress will have its effects on your productivity, health and spirit. You end up living life that is built on the basis of feeling bad, being stressed, tired and overwhelmed, with a constant feeling of there never being enough time for the things you WANT to do and potentially ending up with regrets over how you’ve lived your life.

One of the biggest regrets that people have on their deathbed, according to Bronnie Ware, is:

I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

People can feel a deep regret over how they spent their time when they are nearing their end. Doing work that isn’t fulfilling or meaningful, that isn’t serving you, risks being time you regret spending on doing it.

It’s not that work is inherently bad, it’s that so much of the work we do is spent on things we don’t want to do or don’t care about. And long before this ends up a regret on our deathbed this kind of work and activities lends itself to our feelings of stress and overwhelm which can be seen as a blessing. The feelings of overwhelm, pressure, heaviness or stress can be seen as an invitation to reevaluate what and how you’re doing what you’re doing.

Influential speaker and author Simon Sinek shared in an interview that stress, just like passion, is an output. Both are the results of what has been put in. Let me explain it some more.

Two students part of the same class, studying complex theories with late night studying and the sacrificing of social activities only to study for the upcoming exam, can have two very different experiences.

To the first student this is very stressful and pressuring, and when asked, “Are you enjoying your class?” they would say, “Oh no! I’m just happy it’s over soon!” Whereas the second student is finding the experience very exciting and a great learning experience, and to the question, “Are you enjoying your class?” they’d answer, “Oh yes! I think it’s the best class I’ve ever had!”

The first student is experiencing great levels of stress, overwhelm and discomfort. The second student is taking great joy in learning and being challenged, they’re feeling very energised and driven to finish the assignment. How is it possible that the two students can have two very different experiences of the one and the same class?

Well, firstly life is an inside-out experience not an outside-in experience. Which is another topic to come back to. But in short, it’s not the things that cause our stress but the meaning that we give things that is the cause. But secondly, to one of the students, finishing this class, studying and learning its lessons matters and is important and the work required is simply worth it. But to the other student, doing all this work just isn’t as important, it matters less and therefore feels less worth it.

When we’re engaged with things that matter to us we experience what can appear to the onlooker as us being passionate. And when we’re engaging in activities that don't matter to us having to work hard on it, it might very well look like AND feel like stress. You don’t work on your passion, you work on what matters to you, on what it is that you WANT to do and what that tends to look like is passion – you being passionate about what you do.

This matters, I believe, because when we do more of what we WANT to do we end up feeling more passionate in life. The situation though, is that we’re often doing more busy-work, work that simply doesn’t feel meaningful, AND we’re constantly improving and increasing our personal productivity, learning new hacks and tricks to get even more done, simply doing MORE of the things we DON’T want to do, without making progress towards what we DO want, that which if we did it would infuse more joy, meaning and passion into our lives.

Instead, what is getting done, is often things that just don't feel meaningful, and we’re ending up feeling stressed and overwhelmed. And as I mentioned before, the feeling of overwhelm often leads to procrastination and escaping of discomfort, which negatively affects our productivity, not to mention risk creating all sorts of coping mechanisms and habits. So this is again why I’m so passionate about helping people do more of what they want.

When You Feel Better You Do Better

Have you ever noticed that when you feel good, being in a good mood that things just seem to be working out? When our spirits are high it’s easier to take things less seriously and with a bit less attachment. Things that seemed troublesome yesterday, today feel less problematic and easier to make progress on. The fight or frustration that arose earlier now feels petty and inconsequential. And you’ve surely experienced that when you’re in a lower mood even the smallest of things can feel like the biggest worry or problem to you?

This is why I argue that when you feel better you do better. In some ways, when you feel better there’s less friction for your energy and your creativity than when things are heavy, straining or stressful.

Years ago, when I was still climbing my corporate career ladder I was testing this out myself. And this experience became a big basis for the work I’ve done in the last 16 years with individuals and organisations. At the time, I was still very young both in age and in my employment. And the circumstances that I was working under was one of control, micromanagement and in some instances management by fear, in the pursuit of high and consistent productivity. And productivity was in fact the main if not the only KPI, goal that is, that we followed up.

I was a newly appointed foreman. And I had this belief that if we only enjoyed what we did we’d need less control, less supervision. I thought, that if I can help people enjoy what they do, and for them to WANT to do what they were doing, then I could spend more time on competence development, process improvement and just general leadership improvements, instead of only having time to call people into the office to ask them why they spent 7 minutes on the toilet!

It was a radical idea. The idea that if we feel better we’d do better. And no one of my peers was willing to try this. So I managed to campaign this idea to my boss’ boss. I can’t say where my confidence or certainty come from, I simply KNEW that this would work. I told the boss that initially we’d see a dip in productivity as I would be doing things a bit differently and this would affect people. I’d spend time talking with people, developing trust and mapping out their strengths and discovering their personal motives. And after some time we’d see a rise in productivity to a level that would either match the current one or potentially surpass it.

I was given the mandate to do this only for my department. And I quickly sprung into action. In most ways it all played out exactly as I had envisioned it. Apart from alienating my peers that is. My mission wasn’t a popular one. I guess I was making my colleagues look bad. Either way, the people in my department were starting to enjoy coming to work, they felt seen and respected, and they found themselves better matched with activities and goals that were truly relevant to them. And we became one of the most productive departments AND we had the highest rate of leader succession – a great number of people went on to leadership roles and other specialist roles from within our department – which I take as yet another sign of the success of the experiment.

The experiment launched my career in some way. And I was later asked to implement similar ways of working for other sites around the country.

What I only knew as an inner wisdom or perhaps as a gut feeling, has actually been studied and proven to work on many occasions. And it shows us that perhaps feeling better and feeling good can improve one's results.

In the late 1970s psychologist Alice Isen performed a study on how mood affects people’s creativity1, using a test that was developed by Karl Duncker and published posthumously in 1945. The test has been used in many more studies testing cognitive flexibility and the psychological effects of stress among many things.

The experiment made use of some object; a candle, a book of matches and a box of thumbtacks. With the help of the objects the task was to stick the candle to a corkboard on a wall and when the candle is lit it won’t drip onto the surface below. Now, the participants of the experiment were divided into two groups. One group was given a gift before they started the experiment, a small bag of candy. And the second group didn’t receive any candy or other gifts at all. What was being tested here was whether people’s mood could affect the outcome of the experiment, and the theory was that the group that received the bag of candy would feel more positive as they were trying to solve the task.

Have you figured it out yourself yet, how to solve the problem? The creative solution is to not only consider perhaps the most obvious object; the candle, matches and thumbtacks but to consider the box the thumbtacks came in. If you can stick the box to the wall using the thumbtacks you can place the candle in the box and when lit it won’t drip onto the surface below.

Isen discovered that the participants whose moods were somewhat improved by the gift of the bag of candy were significantly more successful in solving the task. Feeling good or better actually impacts our thoughts and behaviour.

Our creativity and with that our productivity is increased by the fact that when we’re in a better mood we gain access to a broader range of actions, an openness to new experiences and can integrate information better, according to the impactful work done by Barbara Fredrickson. Fredrickson, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an influential voice in the positive psychology field. According to Fredrickson and her theory; Broaden-and-Build2, positive emotions broaden our awareness and build our cognitive and social abilities. When we feel better, our minds open up, can digest more information and see more possibilities around us – this is the broadening part of the theory, it widens our minds.

As an effect of a heightened openness or willingness there are some long-term effects of this, which over time build up mental and emotional capacities that are beneficial to us, like resilience, creativity, problem solving and social connections. This is the building part of the theory, and it helps us increase output. Fredrickson sees these two parts in synergy which help create an upward spiral for change, performance and success.

To me, how this relates to us all is that when we first feel better we can and probably WANT to engage with more things that matters to us, and this leads to a sense of joy, meaning and fulfilment. This leads to an increase in productivity and the likelihood of us achieving what it is we set out to achieve. We can use the momentum of feeling better to consistently engage with activities and behaviours that over time expands and encompasses all our goals and dreams.

In Conclusion

Two things matter the most when it comes to successfully adopting lasting change and maintained performance:

Do you WANT to?
Are you ABLE to?

If you’re ABLE to perform or implement a change but don’t WANT to then little progress will be made in that area. And with the earlier arguments I hope that you now see that feeling better will help you WANT to do more.

But even when you’re WILLING to perform or change but you have doubts about your ability to be successful you’ll be less likely to engage in the acts and behaviours to achieve the performance or change.

Typically, the message out there is to do the “impossible”, hustle, grind and push yourself outside of your comfort zone, THAT’S where growth, performance and success lies, right?

The problem that I have with this is that these strategies all risk making us feel anything but positive, safe or willing – it simply won’t allow us to feel better. If anything, we might feel worse, and so it risks impacting our creativity, problem solving and productivity negatively.

The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the comfort zone as, “the level at which one functions with ease and familiarity”.

Brené Brown described it as "Where our uncertainty, scarcity and vulnerability are minimized—where we believe we'll have access to enough love, food, talent, time, admiration. Where we feel we have some control."3

And Judith Bardwick, the author and management consultant responsible for the popularisation of the dangers of the comfort zone in her book, The Danger Zone, talks about how the comfort zone is a behavioural state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, providing a steady level of performance, without a sense of risk.

If being inside one’s comfort zone leads to anxiety-neutral conditions, where scarcity and vulnerability are minimised, and where we feel we have plenty of time, love, admiration and even a sense of control, and where a steady level of performance is achieved, I don’t see why we’d ever want to go outside it!

Instead, what I propose is that we DO the possible. Do more of the things that you WANT to do and you will build the momentum to achieve your goals and dreams. I suggest that we redefine what productivity looks like, and move away from the “conventional definition” of only when we feel drained and exhausted having worked hard can we say that we’ve been productive. Instead, what would it look like if what we did was fun, or even easy? What if we use that as a guide to getting more things done?

I’m completely convinced that we can use joy, well-being and feeling good as a barometer for productivity, and if we did it would increase both the likelihood and consistency of our performance and success, and in many ways it would feel less heavy or taxing, less effortful which ultimately would increase our efficiency and productivity.

When what we do is something that we WANT to do, and it’s something we’re ABLE to do, it gets done. This is really the most simple way that I can explain why staying INSIDE the comfort zone is an actual strategy for getting things done, which also happens to be easier.

This is the final episode in the “Get things done the easy way” series, a series that set out to help you see how you can get more things done by doing more of the things you WANT to do. In my professional opinion, there’s data that actually backs this up, both scientifically and anecdotally. I’ve shared some of the best resources that I know to help you better understand how you can experiment with this for yourself. Perhaps embarking on this journey isn’t always easy, but it is definitely worth it. Because when you do more of what you want, you get to feel better, and so you do what you do even better, and together this leads to a life lived with more joy, meaning and fulfilment.

Even though this is the end of this series, there’s much more for you to explore by listening to any of my previous episodes and of course to the future episodes helping you change the easy way.