What does it mean to be super productive?
Being super rich?
Super busy?
Super efficient and fast?
Super effective at reaching your goals?
In reality, true productivity has nothing to do with any of these traits.
Productive comes from the Latin verb Producĕre, made up of pro- (forward, out) and ducĕre (to lead, to guide). So producere, in its original meaning, is literally to lead out, to bring forward, to bring to the surface. In effect, it means transforming a resource by drawing out its value, by making that value emerge.
The original meaning of productivity is not ‘doing a lot’ or ‘doing things fast’, but rather bringing something out, taking something that has only potential value and giving it a value that can actually be used.
A productive person is someone capable of turning something useless into something useful, and something useful into something more useful: an idea into a work, a beginner into an expert, a plot of land into a house.
In the Latin world, productivity and fertility converge strongly around the same idea: generating, bearing fruit, bringing out something vital.
‘Producĕre’, in fact, can be translated with the verb ‘to be fecund, fertile, fruitful’.
Fertile comes from the Latin fertilis, from ferre, a verb that means to carry, but also to produce, to generate, to bear fruit. Fertile means capable of generating, of producing fruit, of being productive.
The Treccani dictionary, in fact, defines fertilis as what is productive and capable of producing abundantly¹. We still say today that a soil is fertile, that a period is fertile, that a mind is fertile.
Productive and fertile are very similar, but they are not the same thing.
Fertility indicates a generative capacity, while productivity indicates that this capacity has shown itself in a transformation.
Fertility is the potential to generate.
Productivity is the ability to turn that potential into fruit.
A word with an etymological root very close to ‘fertile’ and ‘productive’ is happy.
The Italian word for happy, felice, comes from the Latin felix, felicis, which means both fertile, fruitful, productive and prosperous, fortunate, favored².
Etymological reconstruction traces felix back to an ancient Indo-European family associated with the meaning of nourishing, producing, generating, from which Latin words such as fecundus (fecund) and fetus (fetus, birth, offspring, fruit) also come.
Fertility is having within yourself the conditions to generate.
Productivity is bringing it out, turning potential into results.
Happiness is the state of what is fecund, productive.
Now let’s look at one last term: useful.
The Italian word utile (useful) comes from the Latin utilis, connected to ‘uti’: to use, to make use of. So utilis is what can be made use of, what is suited to a purpose, advantageous, beneficial.
If fertility indicates the capacity to generate something, usefulness indicates the capacity to serve some purpose.
Being useful means bearing fruit that serves, that generates value for someone. Indeed, no plant produces fruit that is useful only to itself.
Productivity is the disposition to transform the resources available, increasing their value so that they are useful and benefit the whole system.
True productivity does not simply consist in transforming something by increasing its value but, like the fruit of any tree, in creating usefulness for others.
The productive person makes everything and everyone more useful; the unproductive person makes everything and everyone less useful (except to their own interests).
This semantic link explains well every human being’s desire to feel useful. Nothing creates a more fulfilling and pleasant feeling inside us than knowing we have been useful to someone. Nothing is as depressing and devastating as feeling completely useless.
Being super productive basically means being super useful.
A super productive team member is a team member who is extremely useful to their company.
A super productive manager is a manager who is extremely useful to their company and to the people who report to them.
A super productive supplier is a supplier who is extremely useful to their customers.
With that clear, how do you become super productive? How do you become super useful?
First of all, we should ask ourselves who we are useful to. To customers? To team members? To the company? To our children? To our partner?
You cannot define a person’s productivity without first identifying who that person is productive for. It makes no sense to say: ‘you are productive’; it is an incomplete sentence, like saying ‘Paolo eats the’ — the object is missing.
Who are you productive for?
This question defines your so-called referents, that is, all the people for whom we get up in the morning, work, commit ourselves, study, grow, stay disciplined, stay reliable.
Our referents are the people we serve and the people we are of use to.
For each referent, we have a role.
If our referent is a child, that makes us parents.
If our referent is a customer, that makes us salespeople or suppliers.
If our referent is a team member, that makes us managers.
If our referent is a manager, that makes us team members.
Each role defines, precisely and unambiguously, a set of referents.
Our referents tell us, precisely and unambiguously, how we are useful and how we can be super useful.
That is how you become super productive: by asking your referents how you can serve them better.
The traits of the super productive person
Who is most useful to you? Who are the people who are super productive toward you?
These people have certain recognizable and rather rare traits.
They are the ones who manage to make the biggest difference for their companies, for their own lives, and for the lives of the people who live and work with them.
A useful and productive person is someone who makes a difference, who is missed when absent, who will never have trouble finding work or money.
No company, no manager, no man and no woman would ever do without a person who knows how to make themselves truly useful.
People who know how to be super useful have consistent, recognizable traits; let’s look at them one by one.
First trait: they know what they have to do or, if they don’t, they ask. Productive people know their functions, know what their responsibilities are, and when they don’t know, or aren’t sure, they ask their referents.
Second trait: productive people are reliable, meaning they know how to take care of things: they take care of people, projects, objects. They tend not to spoil what is entrusted to them but rather to enhance it, whether it is an object, a person, or a department.
Reliability includes discipline, consistency, honesty, integrity.
Unreliability, by contrast, means being superficial and imprecise.
Third trait: productive people know how to spot problems, how to see them and admit them. They avoid personal opinions and judgments as much as possible, observe reality, and learn from it. This makes them causative*, and leads them to use every single problem as an opportunity for growth and development.
*Seeing themselves as the cause (and not the effect) of problems. An adjective used to describe someone who takes responsibility for their own actions and failures, without looking for outside blame and excuses.
An unproductive person, on the other hand, tends to hide problems or admit them only when it has become unavoidable. Excuses, complaints, and criticism of others are at the root of an unproductive person.
Fourth trait: productive people are competent and, when they are not, they know how to rely on someone more competent than they are or find a way to acquire those skills.
In other words, productive people fulfill their duties and are adequate in all the roles they hold.
These traits and skills can be developed. Through training and practical application, a manager, a team member, a parent, or a partner can be turned into a super productive person.
A course that ignites people’s productivity should teach how to:
- Correctly and precisely identify all of a person’s roles
- Clearly and unambiguously define the functions of each role
- Teach a method to increase personal reliability, discipline, punctuality, and impact at work
- Teach a method to correctly spot problems and raise your own standards
- Build awareness of every area where you fall short or are inadequate, and resolve them
- Build awareness of all the waste in terms of projects, tasks, and roles that are no longer appropriate, and eliminate them, freeing up time on your calendar for something more useful
This course is called ProdUp!.
For more information about the ProdUp! course, write to valentina@prodability.com
Sources and references
*1 - https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/fertile/
*2- Treccani puts it particularly clearly: felice derives from the Latin felix, from the same root family as fecundus, and its original proper meaning is given as fertile (https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/felice/)
Lewis & Short, the great dictionary of classical Latin, gives as the first meaning of felix ‘fruit-bearing, fruitful, fertile, productive’, and then ‘happiness, felicity’ (https://alatius.com/ls/)