Are You a Tortoise or a Hare? Learning to Use Your Personal Workflow

Have you ever heard the Aesops fable of the tortoise and the hare? The hare challenges the tortoise to a raise and ends up losing because he sprints and rests too long to win the race. I (Austin) never really liked this fable, cuz I’m the hare! What if the story was different though? What if at the end of the day, the tortoise and the hare both crossed the finish line? In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about understanding your personal workflow and how you can use it to be more productive every week.

Intro

Keelie works with a lot of people on my team and she tells them it’s ok to do their job with their own workflow. 

Austin and Keelie are complete opposites. Here’s a look at our workflow.

Austin’s Workflow: The Hare

If I sit down for a certain type of task, I’m going to get sucked in. 

Keelie said the idea of being required to sit down for 2 hours for a task gives her palpitations. I don’t have a choice! I’m not DECIDING to sit down for 2 hours, I just know that once I put my mind to a certain type of task, I’m not coming up for air until it’s done and I’ve hit a roadblock.

Keelie’s Workflow: The Tortoise

I always said I was like the energizer bunny, I just keep going and going. So, in this analogy, I’m the tortoise. My workflow is to get up and start being productive from the time I get up to the time I go to bed at night. Not to say that I’m walking in a straight line to the finish line, but I don’t tend to stop moving and doing. I like switching tasks and coming back to things later, because I know I’ll do it later on.

Use Your Workflow to Be More Productive

See the positives to your workflow

Hare

• Has the ability to work on complex projects that needs consecutive hours to complete. 
• Can accomplish tasks fast. 
• Usually tends to have the ability to have a laser focus and a good eye for errors, quality control, etc. 

Tortoise

• Can handle jobs that have a lot of distractions. 
• Good at projects that need to be chipped away at every day. 
• Don’t easily get burned out on a job, because they can and want to vary their tasks.

Don’t Feel Guilty About Your Workflow

Hare

• Don’t feel guilty that you don’t immediately get started on a big task, but wait until your motivation kicks in. 
• It’s ok to put in a massive effort and then take a long break. 

Tortoise

• Don’t feel bad that it takes you all day or several days to get a job done.
• It’s ok if you don’t like to adhere to schedules and time blocks, but have a more fluid workflow.

Recognize what actual procrastination looks like based on your workflow: 

Hare

• Are you actually procrastinating because you put off your task for half the day and sailed into the finish line? 

Tortoise

• Are you procrastinating when you stop working on 1 task to work on other things, because you know you’ll get back to that thing later in the day? 

Real procrastination looks like: 

• Missing deadlines
• Dreading a task and avoiding it completely

Closing

Once you’ve recognized your workflow, but still find yourself regularly procrastinating, there might be an underlying problem. We’ll talk more about this next week.