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Passion is one of those things that can be explored from so many angles. You may be interested in one of my previous articles about finding your passions and expressing your passions if you did not see them. This article looks specifically at how passion enhances productivity. This could be in the workplace or in home/personal life, but there are definitely impacts on productivity when a passion is what drives a person in that area. Here are some of the ways that I’ve learned how passion enhances productivity.

Passion Increases Enthusiasm and Energy

A person with a passion always demonstrates higher enthusiasm and energy toward activities in that area than someone without such a passion. It’s something that makes a person happy and excited and it automatically brings a person to a more alert, active and enthusiastic level. This is a powerful productivity step and is very contagious. This drives productivity by having better feelings and positive energy for the subject and influences others to see what is important and exciting to a person. Enthusiasm is very attractive to others so demonstrating this with a passion keeps you motivated and much more likely to have the support of others. Have a look at Henrik Edberg’s article, “4 Powerful Reasons to Up Your Enthusiasm, and How to Do It “, its a great article!

Passion Keeps You Highly Focused

People always spend their time on things they love when given a choice, so knowing and living your passions increases your productivity by keeping you highly focused. Its easy to concentrate on something you love to do since distractions are less important. It still takes additional effort to learn to avoid distractions, I just know that being in an activity that I’m highly passionate about is a lot easier to avoid distractions than if its an activity I don’t enjoy as much. Takes chores or housework as an example. I am definitely NOT passionately about keeping a prestinely clean house so when I’m tidying up or doing dishes nearly ANYTHING can distract me from that. On the other hand, if I’m reading a good book, something I’m much MORE passionate about, hours can go by where I completely ignore other normal distractions (even phone calls and people at the door).

Staying focused longer term is important as well. Passionate activities are easier to plan for, revisit on a regular basis and have a desire to be involved with. This ensures you have a long term focus on that passion. Whatever the activity is, you’ll be more productive if it is practiced on a regular basis. This could be sports, relationships or other skills and hobbies. The more time and focus you put to it, the more productive you can be with those activities.

Passion Drives Change

photo credit: Greg Melia

Change is something many people fear. I’ve learned by studying passions though that people have many less fears about change related to something they are passionate for than other areas. Ask yourself a few questions about your own passionate activities and then the same for regular things you don’t really care for.

• Do you look for new ways to get involved with that activity?
• Can you spend more time on that area?
• Do you research or learn more about that topic?
• How likely are you to try new things related to your passion?
• Do you want to be more productive in this area?

I think you will find that you are much MORE willing to change when it comes to your passions. All the factors related to passions and those in this article relate to changing the way you do things. This leads to improving yourself and enhancing your productivity.

Less Stress with Passions

Stress is a massive productivity killer. Stress kills focus, it worries people, distracts them, and generally doesn’t result in much useful activities. The good thing about passions is that they are a LOT harder to be stressed about when you are doing things with passion. Passions drives people to enjoy what they do, which results in LESS stress. Even activities and jobs that are thought to be VERY stressful, can easily be enjoyed by people who love doing that. This is just another reason why doing what you love and being passionate about it can help with both handling your stress and by enhancing your productivity since you can more easily deal with the stress and not have it overtake you.

Continuous Thought

Being productive at whatever you want to do requires thinking time. If you are thinking about that more and more, you generally have more ideas, methods and ways to approach a problem so that you can get better at that task or activity. This kind of thinking happens when you are truly passionate about something. You will live and breath that topic and constantly be thinking about it. At work, outside of work, when you wake up, when you go to sleep, when you’re involved in that activity and when you’re not. All this continuous time spent thinking helps you to be clearer, focused, more creative and ultimately more productive when it comes to actually doing that thing you love to do! This is very valuable in the workplace and its easy to see with the people who truly love their jobs, as they are not simply working 8 hours a day, but constantly thinking about their work (they don’t have to actually be working for this) and it pays off in their time at work. The same applies in reverse for things you love to do outside of work. Continuous thought caused by strong passions will definitely improve your overall productivity.

Creativity and Innovation REQUIRE Passion

Productivity to me and in my job definitely links directly to creativity and innovation. I have experienced that those who are more passionate about their work and truly love it, always are more creative and innovation. This leads them to produce new ideas, be willing to change and take new risks to improve things and it also helps steer and lead others where they may otherwise fall into a path of complacency. All of this happens more naturally when there is a passion driving individuals to do this steps. It is VERY rare to find innovators and lots of creative ideas where there are no passionate people working in that area. It can be found but it generally doesn’t last or at the very least, it doesn’t produce the same level of innovation that a passion based group would deliver. This demonstrates that continuous and high levels of innovation REQUIRE passion, and since those are important factors to me that bring about enhanced productivity, I believe that passion really is required to achieve this.

Do you know of other ways that passion enhance productivity? Please add a comment about it if you do. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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