There is a lot to be said about productivity. Do this, don’t do that and more of the like. One of my favourite quotes comes from management theorist Peter Drucker who said, “if you cannot measure something, you cannot improve it”. So all the productivity tips, tricks, methods and hacks in the world will count for little without the ability to measure productivity. Our discussion is about how to measure productivity to get the best out of your time.
Productivity is efficiency
Productivity is, of course, a measure of how efficiently a job is done. So we look at the output versus the input, in most cases, time. There is a tendency to focus on efficiency that sometimes creates problems in the thinking around productivity. We must remember that effectiveness comes (or at least should) before efficiency. Effectiveness is getting the job done or meeting the requirements. An example is an incomplete or poor-quality article, I can create one very fast, but it cannot be published. So to measure productivity, we need to ensure that we are effective before we worry about being efficient. This brings us to our methods of measuring productivity.
Productivity as profit
One good way of measuring productivity is by looking at it as profitability. Simply put, the amount of profit you draw from the resources available. So you could look at how much work is covered over time or given the cost of the inputs. If your output is a combination of more than one type of input, such as time plus materials, you can easily attach a monetary value to the time by using the per-hour rate you pay for the time.
Productivity as Performance
Sometimes you want to look at productivity in a different way. If you paid someone to make a website and they charged you a flat fee, it wouldn’t matter to you how fast or slow (within reason) the job is done. What matters is that the job is done. In this case, you are looking at productivity as performance, which works best when the job has a flat fee structure. This has the slight disadvantage of looking at things in a binary manner (done or not done), but it works in certain circumstances.
Productivity as time management
What many of us will be familiar with is productivity as time management. The mistake here is focusing on the input time rather than the output time. See, I can sit at my desk for 8 hours, but it is almost always certain that I am not doing 8 hours of work. So looking at my output as though it is from 8 hours would be wrong. They say you work roughly 3-4 hours when you sit at a desk for 8 hours. So you need to develop accurate measures of time put in and compare them to your output. Celebrating the amount of time you put in isn’t enough.
Productivity as Progress
Some tasks are huge, so much so that we cannot look at them in a binary manner that performance would. If you were building a large structure that takes time, you would have to look at the progress of the structure rather than a binary “done vs not done” paradigm. So looking at productivity as progress is ideal in this case. It takes the black and white of performance and adds some shades of grey.
Productivity as customer satisfaction
There are still some things that cannot fit into the methods we have discussed thus far. The success or failure of some things rests on another party’s determination, like a customer. Sometimes it may be an end user who is not the customer. Here we can only measure productivity through the satisfaction of the customer or end user. We can spend all the time or resources in the world and still not please the customer. We can completely please the customer or partially please them. Where we are fortunate, we will receive direct feedback even if we have to ask for it. Where we are unfortunate, our only sign that we failed to please the customer is they never come back.
So those are 5 methods to measure productivity. Each one stands on its own, but you can also combine them, and I recommend that you do. Using multiple productivity measures can give you better insight into how well you are doing.
