How to find the right balance between acceptance and productivity?

Why is acceptance not enough, and what else do you need to improve sustainable productivity?

There are moments in life when you are stuck. It's as if nothing else matters because something more important, yet indefinite, is taking your attention. This can be incredibly frustrating, especially when you see all your tasks piling up untouched and all your life projects postponed.

Seven years ago, I had to undergo major surgery. I moved to the hospital with my iPad and new phone, ready to make the most out of my recovery days. "I'll take this event as a good reason to stop and recover. During these five days, I'll write my book about women." (Yes, I know; there was written failure all over.)

Long story short, I've never used that iPad for the following five months. The recovery has been very long and demanding, and I regained my productivity almost after five years.

No, I'm not joking.

Back then, I was used to having two weird beliefs about productivity that I hadn't discovered and changed until that moment in my life.

First, I used to think about productivity as area-related. So, you can recover from work-related tasks but be easily productive on non-work-related ones.

Second, I was used to thinking about productivity as something you have or not, or even worse, "you are" or "you are not."

But I was totally missing the whole point.

Productivity depends on many different elements, and you cannot control all of them.

I was torn by the question: Where has my unshakeable focus and ability to be productive, which have characterized me so far, gone? How is it even possible to lose it?

Focus, attention, memory, and thus productivity are some things incredibly volatile.

They are related to too many elements and aspects, and you really need to train yourself to manage them, acknowledging that you’ll never control them.

During that moment, I learned that I need to accept what is happening to me, especially if plans don't go as planned (yes, I'm still writing that book after seven years).

I learned acceptance.

Yes, life is very complicated, and our ability to foresee the unexpected is very flawed.

Unexpected events are the first things that affect our productivity level continuity and ability to pay attention to things.

It's not just a "getting older" matter.

I remember reading six years ago a tiny book by Marc Manson titled Life Love Books—Advice you wish your parents had given you. The first chapter starts by explaining "The Four Stages of Life." Life phases tell us how we behave, what we are looking for, how we try to implement each stage of our lives, and based on which values.

The stages are:

1. Mimicry: it’s figuring out how to function within society so that we can be autonomous, self-sufficient adults.
2. Self-discovery: it’s a pretty self-explanatory phase in which we try a lot of things and we want to figure out what we are capable of.
3. Commitment: narrowing down our possibilities and focusing on fewer things.
4. Legacy: it’s about finding meaning and creating a legacy that lasts beyond our death.

That said, it’s pretty obvious that our attention and ability to focus and be productive cannot be the same throughout our lives and can totally change.

After all, we pay attention to what is important and relevant to us.

And what's important and relevant changes greatly depending on the phase of our life.

When living in Rome ten years ago, I was used to sleeping 4/5 hours per night and working continuously.

After the surgery, I was asking myself, "I cannot do that anymore; what is happening to me?"

Then, I made this connection and realized that attention and focus are not just independent cognitive abilities. They are resources strictly dependent on the phases of our lives, the events we go through, and our goals, needs, and values.

Trying to recover from something major is different from not having the cognitive ability to focus and pay attention; it is just that you are absorbed by something different: recovering.

When you are recovering, there is no distinction between work and non-work-related tasks: all your attention and focus are elsewhere.

But there was more. As the book says: "Transitions between the life stages are usually triggered by trauma or an extreme negative event in one's life […]

Trauma causes us to step back and re-evaluate our deepest motivations and decisions. It allows us to reflect on whether our strategies to pursue happiness are actually working well or not. Marc Manson

At that moment, it wasn't necessary anymore for me to be productive and keep working on seven different projects simultaneously, showing how good I was and opening as many opportunities as possible.

While recovering, I was also entering the "commitment" phase, narrowing down my focus and, thus, productivity to something more important.

Accepting all these things simultaneously has been key to my recovery and growth.

Getting genuine acceptance without silently blaming anyone can be very demanding but necessary to recover.

But there was still something off.

I accepted everything, but I was still lost.

More in peace, yes, but still lost.

It was like I wanted to run a bike, but I couldn't find any instructions.

This led me to a new form of procrastination, and for procrastination, I mean that feeling of being stuck and not moving toward what is important to you, which seems to be one of the most important elements when it comes to achieving fulfillment.

I was accepting, but I wasn't acting.

The worst part was that I couldn't tell the difference between inactivity caused by procrastination and inactivity caused by acceptance of the events.

Well… It's the same.

That's what I told myself at some point. After all, why do I need to care about it since the feeling of paralysis is making me feel very sad and frustrated anyway?

Who cares which is the cause?

Gaining discernment over this matter is very difficult, and you cannot do it just by talking with yourself at a conscious level.

If you use acceptance to justify your inaction, you'll always find good reasons to support your thesis and reassure yourself that you genuinely accept what is happening in your life.

But what can I do if I cannot explain it by reasoning with myself?

I need a strategy.

Many people tell me: “no, I don’t need another strategy; I can figure it out somehow.”

But that’s what a strategy is: a way to figure things out.

A strategy is simply what our brain does to reach a goal.

Actually, we all have a strategy for everything we do.

And if you think about it, acceptance is a strategy in itself.

However, not all the strategies are good. While all of them are effective in some way, they are not all good strategies.

I was looking for a strategy that allowed me to accept and, at the same time, do something, making me leave that state of inactivity.

The real decision, in fact, is not between do and don't accept or don't do and accept.

It is more about how we can rethink doing and combine this new idea of doing with acceptance to reach an "active acceptance."

I needed a strategy that would allow me to do what I desired in a way that was in balance and harmony with that phase of my life.

What I wanted to avoid was creating the weird and vicious loop of acceptance that leads to inactivity and resolve in acceptance of frustration generated by inactivity instead of acceptance of the event that originated the inactivity.

Doing strategically and meaningfully was the only way to be sure I was practicing acceptance without using it as an excuse to procrastinate.

You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need. Rolling Stones.

And to try, you need a strategy to break that vicious loop.

So here is something you can start with that I found very useful to overcome that difficult moment:

1. Think about your idea of productivity: often, we have an unconscious level of acceptable productivity that is not even real. Take a moment and think about where you got that measurement and why you made it a standard for yourself. Maybe it was you in the past? Or someone else you are trying to model?
2. Set a new and more sustainable productivity level that aligns more with your life phase, and expect your attention and productivity ability to act accordingly. Are you narrowing down your interests? Are you protecting what you've already done? Are you committing to doing less and more meaningful things? Are you out to discover new possibilities?
3. Write down your new values and needs and keep them visible. Remember, we always forget even important things, not to mention decisions and why we made them in the first place. So be sure to keep it visible and accessible.
4. Reframe the idea of acceptance.?Acceptance means doing less but not being stuck. In fact, consider the paralysis as a red flag for procrastination instead of acceptance.
5. Look for personalized strategies from an expert. You cannot even imagine how much money, time, and frustration you save and how much fulfillment you gain from having a strategy you can use whenever things change and you don't know where to start. It's a treasure, always there for you.

It's exactly like when you get an injury. You mustn't stop exercising even if it seems like the obvious thing to do. You want to keep going, but with something different and thought for your recovery. Stopping the exercise will cause more problems than doing it. But you need to know what to do, and for that, you need help from a specialist.

Focus and productivity are the same.

It's not moving that makes you feel productive, but moving toward the right direction, even with tiny steps.