Being Busy
Have you ever gotten to the end of a busy day and thought to yourself: "I really didn't get anything important done today"? Productivity isn't measured by how "busy" you are; on the contrary, being busy can often lead to being unproductive. Productivity is defined as "the effectiveness of productive effort, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input" - or more simply put, how much you get out of what you put in. By definition, being really busy doesn't mean anything in relation to productivity unless all that effort is producing results. So how then, can you ensure that all your "busy time" ends up being productive time? For most of us there are two aspects of our lives - work and personal. For the sake of this post, I'll be talking about personal productivity; however, the same method can be used to measure and improve work productivity as well. So let's get started.
You Need A Number
Ever heard the phrase "what gets measured gets done"? Or, "if you can measure it, you can manage it"? These are sayings that go back as far as the 1500's, and still hold true today. Many organizations operate with the principal that every employee must have a number, a measurable of some sort; and for good reason. Holding people accountable to a number gives them a goal to work towards, a standard to achieve. Without it, people will fly blind and go through their day doing what they think is "enough". The same holds true for yourself and your own productivity. In order to be truly productive you need to be able to give your productivity a number; a standard, a par, something you work toward achieving every day. But before we get into the details of how to come up with your number and how to track it, we must first figure out what criteria will be used to create your number.
What's Important
Think about the aspects of your life that are most important to you and write them down. This could be spending time with family, having enough time to participate in your favorite hobby, or being able to volunteer in your local community or church. Now think about the things you'd like to get done that you know will help you work towards a goal or become a better person. This list might consist of things like learning a new language, taking a class, or getting to the gym on a regular basis. Next, combine these lists into one master list. This list should now contain all the things that are important to you AND all the things you want to get done daily (many of these items may overlap, so don't worry about which list you put certain things in, they all end up in the same place anyways). Don't hold back when coming up with this list; even if it seems you won't have the time for everything you're thinking of, write it down anyways. You'll be surprised at how much you can get done once you start keeping track. Now set your list aside for a moment while we figure out how much time you have to dedicate to it each week.
Catch Some Zs
There are 168 hours in a week; no more, no less. Everyone has these same 168 hours to work with. Now it's time to decide how you're going to spend them. I'm going to have you start by getting the least productive (yet utterly essential) thing out of the way first; the time you dedicate to sleep. Far too many people put sleep last, when in reality it should be first. Lack of proper sleep can lead to all sorts of bad things, many of which will impede your ability to be productive. How much sleep you need is totally up to you. You should be familiar enough with your body to know how you function with four hours of sleep compared to seven hours of sleep. They key is to find that sweet spot where you aren't over-sleeping, but aren't leaving your body sleep deprived either. My personal daily goal is six hours with one "catch up day" on Sundays when I don't set an alarm and allow my body to wake up naturally. This usually ends up being either seven or eight hours depending on how worn down I am from the week. So in my example, I'm dedicating 44 of my 168 hours to sleep each week (6 hours x 6 days = 36 hours + 8 hours on Sundays = 44 hours). This leaves me with 124 hours of potential productive time each week. Time to take a look at our second "necessary evil".
Don't Quit Your Day Job
Chances are that you, like me, have a day job that pays the bills. And chances are that you have to dedicate a certain amount of time to this job at least five days a week. Now this part may be more difficult for some. There are many industries in which schedules constantly change, or the number of hours required each week change based on business. For these people, I'd recommend coming up with an estimate and doing your best to adjust as necessary. Look back at the past few months (or even years if your business changes based on seasonality) and try to come up with your average hours worked each week over that time frame. For those of us lucky enough to have a nine to five, the total hours worked each week should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 40. For me personally, it's closer to 55-60 hours each week (five 11-12 hour days). Remember that all we're trying to do here is figure out how much time you're "losing" to work. Take this number and subtract it from your post-sleep potential productive time. In my case it would be 124 hours less my 60 hours of work each week; leaving me with 64 hours (it's easy to see how quickly your weekly hours can disappear). Everyone's number will be slightly different at this point, but let's see what we can do with the time we have left.
Prioritize
At this point, you should have somewhere between 50-80 hours left in your productivity bank (work habits and sleep schedules can vary greatly from person to person). Time to go down your list and decide what makes the cut. Prioritize your list with the things most important to you at the top, and those least important at the bottom. Next, create two more columns next to your list. You should now have column A, which contains your list, column B, which will be used to list the amount of time you will be dedicating to the items on your list, and column C, which will be used to indicate how much time you have left in your productivity bank. Now start at the top of the list and decide how much time you'd like to dedicate to each item on a weekly basis. For instance; if you currently aren't exercising but would like to make it a point to go for a 30 minute walk every day, you would write 3.5 hours next to "walking" (30 minutes a day times seven days a week). If walking were the first thing on my list, I'd have "walking" in column A, 3.5 hours in column B, and 60.5 hours in column C (the amount of time I have left in my weekly productivity bank after sleep, work, and now walking). Repeat this process with each item on your list until you have about 10-14 hours left in your weekly productivity bank. This should leave you just enough time for all the other unproductive, yet unfortunately necessary stuff like eating, showering and getting ready for work each day. If there are still items on your list that didn't make the cut, now is the time to decide how important they really are. If you feel strongly that something which didn't make the cut definitely should have, that means you either didn't prioritize it high enough, or you dedicated too much time to the other things on your list. Feel free to massage some of the times and the order of the items as necessary. It's important to commit to this list now. Trying to find the time later to do the things that didn't make the cut just isn't going to work. Remember that we're trying to maximize your productive time here, so anything that doesn't make the list should be considered a distraction at this point.
Your final list should look something like this.
Daily Goals
Now it's time to take those weekly hours and decide how you're going to use them each day. For those things that you want to do equally every single day, it'll just be an even spread (total hours divided by seven). In my example above, this would apply to language, reading, audio books, writing, and studying (30 minutes a day for the first three, and one hour a day for the last two). For others, the amount of time spent may depend on the day of the week. In my example, "exercise" would be one hour per day, Monday through Saturday (with Sunday as a rest day); and "family time" would be one hour per day, Monday through Friday, with five hours per day on Saturday and Sunday. Go through your own list and decide how best to split your time. Once you have your weekly hours broken up into daily hours, you'll then want to convert those daily hours into minutes (hopefully I don't need to explain the math on this). You should now have a list that looks similar to this:
Notice I removed work from this list. Remember that we're focusing on your personal productivity here; the only reason we had work on the first list is so we could figure out how much of your weekly time it consumed.
Creating A Productivity Score
To begin, you'll need to use some sort of spreadsheet application - I prefer Google Sheets over Microsoft Excel simply because it's web-based and more easily accessible from anywhere, at anytime (I do prefer Excel's interface over Sheets, but for simple lists and formulas, Sheets works well enough). Sheets also has a lightweight mobile app that, in my opinion, is much easier to navigate than the Excel mobile app. The Sheets app can be downloaded for free for both Android and iOS. Regardless of which spreadsheet application you decide to use, the steps moving forward should be very similar. You're going to want to start by listing the day of the week in column A, the date in column B, and then each of the items you want to track in column C and on. The final column should be titled "Productivity Score"; this is where your formulas will be entered, but we'll get to that later. At this point, feel free to fill in the dates and days of the week for the rest of the year by simply clicking and dragging down from the bottom corner of the first day and date entered (this works the same in both Sheets and Excel).
Your spreadsheet should now look something like this.
Next, we're going to enter the formulas for your productivity score. In order to make things a little easier, I'm just going to refer to the cells as they appear in my example (keep in mind that your actual cell locations will vary depending on how many different items you decided to track). Using my example, we're going to be entering the following formula into cell L2: "=((C2/360)+(D2/60)+(E2/1)+(F2/60)+(G2/30)+(H2/30)+(I2/30)+(J2/60)+(K2/60))/9". If the formula doesn't make sense on its own, then try thinking of it like this: "time actually spent doing the thing you want to do divided by the time you want to spend doing it (your goal)". So "C2/360" is the number of minutes I actually slept (C2) divided by the number of minutes I'd like to sleep (360). This gives me my productivity score for sleep. This is then summed with the other productivity items I'm tracking and then divided by the number of items tracked (nine in this case) to give me my overall productivity score. Once you enter your formula, an easy way to test it is to enter your exact goals into each of the cells. If your formula is correct, your productivity score should be 100%.
If only every day looked like this...
If your formula is correct, you can go ahead and copy it into all the other cells in columns L (remember your column may be different) by dragging down from the corner just like you did for the days/dates earlier. If your time spent on certain items varies on the weekends or certain days of the week, you'll need to go back and adjust your formulas to reflect your time goals on those specific days. Once that's done, you can take some time to apply some conditional formatting to your cells so it's easier to see your progress at a glance as time goes on. Since this isn't absolutely necessary, I'm not going to go into detail on how to apply the conditional formatting (feel free to Google it if you're unsure). Now that your formulas have been entered, and you've beautified the cells with conditional formatting, you should be all set to begin tracking your progress and getting your daily productivity score. Here's what the first month of this year has looked like for me:
Slow start to my year as you can see. Trying to make it a point to break at least 90% daily.
Tracking Your Time
At this point you may be thinking "Great. Now I'm going to waste all my time tracking how I spend my time, in an effort to use that time more effectively." (time-ception!) But worry not! Once we get a system in place, you shouldn't need to spend more than five to ten minutes a day tracking and logging your progress. Now, since I have no idea what's on your personal list, explaining exactly how to track each item is going to be a bit difficult. I can, however, show you how I track my time, and hopefully you'll be able to devise your own method from there. Personally, I prefer to rely on technology whenever possible. There are quite a few apps out there which can be used to track your time. Some are great, others okay, and some just plain suck. My personal favorite is Quality Time; but unfortunately it's only available for Android at the moment. Feel free to browse and download as many as necessary until you find one you like. Taking a look at my list, you'll see that language (Duolingo), reading (Kindle, NY Times app), audio books (Audible), writing (Blog, Google Docs), and studying (Khan Academy) are all things that I can do on my phone. Quality Time automatically tracks how much time you spend in each application, but you can also set it to notify you once you've spent a certain amount of time in that application as well (great for letting you know when you reach your daily goal, or conversely, letting you know when you've spent too much time in a not so productive app *ahem* Facebook *ahem*). Tracking the rest of the items on my list is fairly simple since I tend to do them all in one sitting. I sleep my six hours all in one shot, typically spend about an hour at the gym, and spend the last hour of each evening at home with my wife. Many time management apps also have a manual time tracking feature which allows you to manually enter your time spent doing "non-digital" things by starting and stopping a timer within the app. You should look into using this feature if you find that taking mental notes isn't working for you. I find that entering all the previous day's data first thing in the morning works best for me. It saves time by only having to open up the spreadsheet once, and it also creates a habit; which helps ensure I get it done every day. If you use a computer either at home or at work, you may find it useful to set it up so that your spreadsheet opens automatically upon startup. You can find more details on how to do so here. But regardless of what method you choose, you should make it a point to enter the information in daily. The whole point of this exercise is to not only track and grade your productivity, but to also create an awareness for yourself of how you spend your time that will allow you to hold yourself accountable.
Managing Your Time
If you're anything like me, you may find the first few weeks of productivity tracking a little depressing. I failed miserably my first few weeks. It seemed as though I never had enough time to get everything on my list done. I was almost to the point of adjusting my goals to make them a little bit easier, but I kept reminding myself that numbers don't lie; the time was there, I just wasn't utilizing it properly. I encourage you to avoid adjusting any of your goals once you have set them (unless you decide to adjust them to be more aggressive; in that case, go on with your bad self). If you're struggling to find the time to complete everything on your list, you may need to stop and reflect on how you're using all your bits of downtime throughout the day. You'd be surprised at how much time you have in-between everything that goes on during a typical day. You probably even have time in-between activities at work that you could use to work toward some of your personal goals. The key is finding those "dead spots" in your day and resurrecting them. Bring them to life with actions; actions that bring you closer to your goals. Take your commute to work for instance; this is a layup that most people miss. Instead of listening to Taylor Swift's latest hit (I don't listen to the radio, so I have no idea if she is even relevant anymore) put on an audio book or podcast about something you'd like to learn. If you look close enough, you'll find that there are little gaps in your day that you can use to chip away at the things on your list. Instead of browsing Instagram or Reddit when on the porcelain throne (come on, you know you're guilty of this), use those five minutes of freedom to do something productive instead. Rather than spending ten minutes around the water cooler chatting it up, take that time to work on your goals. When you start to add up all the "five minutes here" and "ten minutes there", you'll find that you have a lot more time available than you think. So now the question is no longer "Do you have the time?", it's "Do you have the discipline to put your time to good use?". Hopefully this productivity tracker will help you find the answer.