One of the most important ideas in Steve Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is that of P/PC balance. The P stands for production, the amount of output you create. Production is the goal you are trying to meet and can often seem like the most important aspect of your career, financial, or personal aspirations. However, production capacity or PC is equally as important for without this capacity nothing will be produced and no goals will be met. Sometimes work on PC can be temporarily put aside to focus on output, but this time needs to be made up be working on PC until it is back to full capacity. Ideally, you strive to keep work on P and PC in balance at all times.
Many different activities count as PC building. Organisation and planning are a big part of the equation. Being prepared to produce is just as important as producing itself. Looking after your mental and physical health is also a PC activity. Suffering from mental burn-out or even physical exhaustion will prevent you from getting things done. Although it is possible to put these considerations aside for a short-term deadline, long-term neglect will lead to a complete loss of production capability and thus a loss of production. Certain routine tasks also maintain our ability to produce. Making sure the materials are available, procedure written up for review, and notes recorded makes it easier for us to continue production. Finally, it is not just about maintaining PC but improving it. Learning new practical and organisational techniques help to improve PC as well as enhancing or stream-lining old ones is a critical aspect of PC.
My P/PC balance had lately gotten very far out of balance. I was capable of large efforts on the production side putting in long hours, working all week, and spending time thinking about how to produce more. But over the long-term this ability has faded as I have not spent enough time maintaining and improving my PC. I even feel that I have become worse at some activities I used to be more skilled at and have not advanced as far as I would have liked by this point in my project. As part of getting P and PC back into balance I have committed to more scheduling of routine tasks so they require less mental effort to complete. Additional planning of the papers I want to write and the experiments I want to have done. These two activities go towards the planning and organisational side of the P/PC balance. In terms of exercise I am biking every weekday to and from work as well as a ride on Saturday when I am home. I play squash with friends once a week and will go for a short bush-walk every Wednesday. Other activities include reading a lot more about organisational habits such as the book discussed above and keeping a website on my work procedures to make it easier to complete experiments. I am also attempting to tackle one PC activity per day as part of my three daily 'big rocks'. I know there are many more things I could be doing on PC but these things are enough for now. So far I am feeling really positive about these changes and they seem to be helping a lot. I will endeavor to keep them going.
