Following up from our previous post on the mystery of overall economic productivity, let’s address the issue of personal productivity. This is issue is addressed in a rather long post by Seth Godin ‘Business/busyness‘.
For people immersed in the new economy, the concept is quite difficult: “If you had a factory job, it wasn’t your job to worry about productivity. Somebody else was in charge. You did what you were told, all day, every day. Now, more than ever, you’re likely to be running a team, managing a project or deciding on your own agenda as a free agent. Time is just about all you’ve got to spend.”
In any case, just keeping busy defeats the purpose of productivity. “Busy is not your job. Busy doesn’t get you what you seek. Busy isn’t the point. Value creation is.
You only get today once. Your team does too. How will you spend it?”
Seth Godin then goes into explaining that productivity being the measure of output produced by the time taken to produce it, it all comes to measuring the value created. And it’s where is gets somewhat difficult. While “likes and friends are not an output“, on the contrary, meaningful conversations with team members in your project have value and require time. Thus, measuring actual productivity is difficult. Are we spending time on bureaucratic tasks or actual tasks that create value to a client?
Measuring productivity, financially or otherwise, remains a major challenge even at personal level. However at that level, we can pick and choose the measurement yard we prefer: money, relationship quality, or maintaining our garden.
