What's Your Productivity Index? 4 Ways to Rate (and Boost) It
With the movement to remote work and an increase in the number of professionals working from their computers, we now have access to more data on people's work outputs than ever before.
This has led us to, as some have termed it, the Age of Data.
This professional movement towards computer work allows companies and businesses the ability to track, record, and analyze just about every activity of their employees' job cycle.
Kind of freaky, I guess.
But what isn't so weird is all the awesome data and information that we now have access to because of this.
And this leads us to the purpose of this article, productivity.
In this post, we are going to take a look at a number of strategies you can use to get a better gauge of how productive you are and where you can improve.
Leverage The Productivity Index to Better Gauge Your Work Output
There are a number of ways productivity can be measured.
Here are some strategies to help you better understand your work habits.
Strategy 1: Productivity Output Formula
Yes, this strategy does include pulling out your calculator. But I promise it's a simple formula that will bring a solid and tangible estimation of your personal or professional productivity output.
Here's how it works:
1. Choose the output or task you'd like to measure in numerical form. You know, x amount of emails written or x number of blog posts completed.
2. Now, think about your input figure, usually hours of labor expended on this task.
3. Next, divide the output by the input.
4. Assign a value to the result, normally how much you were paid for this task. This will measure your cost-benefit ratio.
This formula has been designed to give you a tangible feel of how much you are making for a given task or how much a given task is likely costing you.
It's not perfect, but it's simple and a great place to start giving you a greater understanding of where your time is being spent and how much it's worth to you.
Strategy 2: Time Tracking Software And Extensions
Another super simple way to track your productivity is to employ the services time tracking software or browser extension.
There are a few awesome tools that are readily available online to do this, here are some that I've found easy to use:
Toggl Track - the perfect personal time tracker.
Harvest - great for tracking the hours and expenses of a team.
HourStack - a good blend of both personal and team time tracking.
Task tracking in this way makes things super easy. All your work-based metrics are recorded in one place all ready for you to review and analyze whenever you feel.
Strategy 3: Feedback From Coworkers Or Loved Ones
This strategy is fairly simple, it involves asking your fellow coworkers, employees, or loved ones to rate your productivity. A strategy back by research, a study suggesting that objective feedback can help to both energize and direct work behavior in a positive direction.
This strategy is particularly powerful when these people observe how you work day in day out. For office workers, this is fairly straightforward, particularly if you work close-by a set of other co-workers. And for remote workers, asking someone you work alongside will do the trick.
In order for this to be successful, the people you are asking have to be honest and not worried about what you will think once they give their feedback.
So before you employ this strategy, be sure to take your ego out of things and accept their feedback from a place of growth.
Their idea here is to take what is said as a motivating source.
Positive feedback should drive you to continue on continuing on. You're doing great and it's the perfect place to build an even stronger productive base.
While negative feedback can be used to drive you onwards into productive territory you may have never ventured into before.
Strategy 4: To-do Calendars and To-do Lists
For me at least, there is nothing more motivating, and satisfying, than ticking off a task from a to-do calendar or to-do list.
In fact, research has shown that giving yourself deadlines boosts productivity and reduces procrastination.
To-do lists also help to break down large, and somewhat daunting, tasks into smaller more manageable increments.
A venture that is likely to produce productivity-boosting results.
Final Thoughts
With the Age of Data comes the great opportunity to take your productivity to the next level.
The productivity index tells us we can easily boost our productivity, reduce procrastination, and get more down than we’ve ever been able to accomplish before.
By employing these above strategies you should be well on your way to doing this.