Good morning/afternoon/evening! How are you all today? Good good. So how productive were you today/yesterday? Was that more or less than the day before? Really, that is very interesting. But tell me, how are you measuring how productive you are?
It is an important question. If you don’t have an adequate way of measuring how well you are doing at something, you have absolutely no way of telling whether you are getting better, staying the same, or worst of all, slipping back into a quagmire of procrastination. Most of us have a feel for how we have got on – at the end of the day when you sit on the bus home you know whether that was a ‘productive day’ or a ‘got nothing done day’. How can we make this more precise? How can we give ourselves a better idea of how we are getting on day-to-day?
There is no perfect solution – no silver bullet (or may be that should be ’silver bullet-point’). There are however a number of different things you can try – some are more applicable to different types of work, and others work better as part of a basket of measures:
1) Ask Your Self
Simply by asking yourself every day “Was that better, worse or the sames as yesterday” you will start to get a better picture of how you are doing. Are there more good days than bad days?
2) Use a Scale
Rather than just rating yourself as ‘good’, ‘bad’, or ‘indifferent’, trying giving yourself a mark out of five. Three is an average day, five is outstanding, and one is – well, you should have stayed in bed and got some more sleep. If you are particularly geeky (ie. if you are me) then you could even plot this trend on a graph to see how you are doing.
3) Count the Tasks
Not one that works for all things, but can be very effective for others. If everything you have to do is similar in duration and complexity, then by seeing how many you do each day will show you how you are getting on. My brother spends a fair bit of his time phoning customers so the number of calls he has got through each day gives him a good idea whether he has had a good or bad day. This would also work with the number of Christmas cards you have written for example!
4) Ask for Feedback
I think feedback in all circumstances is good, but that aside, why not ask your boss or colleagues each day how productive they think you have been today.
5) Use a Timer
Just a simple timer can show you an awful lot about what you are up to. Time how long you are on the phone for each day. How long you have spent talking to customers. How long driving. How long on Facebook. How long reading inspiring and informative productivity and personal development blogs 
. Each of these will show you how you spend your time each day – pick one to start with and see what it shows you.
6) Leftovers
What is there left at the end of the day that you haven’t managed to do yet? Does it change day-to-day? How much overtime are you having to do to complete your work?
7) Review This Regularly
One of the biggest problems with metrics is they tend to drift. What you call an average productive day now, may be a bad day in 6 months time – just make sure you are constantly appraising how you are measuring what you are doing.
How do you measure how productive you are being?
