Can you gain productivity from studying gardening? Absolutely! Plants and gardening can teach us all kinds of tricks and perspectives that can help you reframe some of your daily work, and grow even further.
Daily water grows mighty trees.
The shade from a large and towering tree doesn’t just spring up overnight. Growth takes years of water and sunshine. Each season and each day, it receives nutrients and water that help it grow into the perfect spot to have a picnic under, and a home for the birds.
It also shows us that we can’t expect incredible results overnight. However, we can track little wins each day. If we take our massive goals for success and break them down into daily actions, we can gain a new level of momentum with tiny daily efforts. Plus if we take the mindset of using each day to get a little better we get to the famous Kaizen!
Rotate your crops
Planting the same plant over and over in the same soil eventually will strip the ground of the nutrients it needs. There are also some plants that add nutrients back into the soil and take others out. To help, the USDA recommends swapping out crops at least once every three to four planting cycles!
How often do you change up your daily schedule? Do you always head into work and follow the same schedule of certain tasks until a time, and then switch to meetings in the afternoon? Try putting your meetings in the morning and tasks in the afternoon, one day a week, and see if any new ideas pop up! Sometimes all we need is a pattern interrupt to find a way to the next level.
Pruning to increase productivity
Pruning is intentionally cutting off dead or old growth. It helps plants to grow into new shapes or even spur new growth in a new season! The University of Georgia found that it actually helps the fruit quality in fruit-bearing plants!
Not every task carries equal weight in outcome. Sometimes we have to delegate or fully delete a task and “prune” it from our to-do lists. That pruning gives us the space we need to devote time and resources to those tasks that matter most, or open space for our other goals. If you’ve had a task that’s been on your list for weeks or is constantly at the bottom, it might be time to delegate or delete it altogether!
