Measuring your productivity is vital in every stage of your growth and development as a student or a working professional. It helps you discover;
The areas you need to improve
How to improve in these areas
The factors that affect your productivity
But how do you measure your productivity? See how to measure your productivity;
1. Compare Your Final Results With Your Expected Results
Set targets for yourself and compare them with your final outputs. These targets should be challenging but realistic, with appropriate timelines to help you monitor and track your progress. As a student, you can set study targets daily, or result targets every semester, and compare the final result.
Working professionals can set monetary, growth, staff-size targets on a quarterly or yearly basis. This method ensures that you are not measuring your productivity based on assumptions but on your evident output.
2. Evaluate Your To-Do List
If you want to know how productive you are, your to-do list should show you clearly. Your to-do list defines your itinerary for the day, week, or month– it reveals what you take as a priority and how much time or effort you dedicate to each task. You could become less productive when you handle high-priority tasks last.
You need to note that the first things to handle on your schedule list are the urgent tasks, followed by the important ones. There is a clear difference between urgent and important tasks.
Urgent tasks are very time-dependent and value-dependent.
Important tasks are more value-dependent than time-dependent.
So you should note that if your to-dos are not following this format, you are likely less productive.
3. Analyse Feedback
Feedback is very important as a freelancer, student, business personnel, working professional, etc. It helps you understand people’s reactions to your performance and know what to focus on. You should always ensure that feedback (from your clients, customers, bosses, study mates, colleagues, etc.) is part of your productivity metrics. While you may make personal assessments or use some artificial means to measure your productivity, human reviews are the truest and more realistic.
4. Monitor Your Profits
Profits are a sure way of measuring productivity. For instance, if your business yields thirty thousand dollars in the first quarter of the year and forty-five thousand in the second quarter, this signifies a 50% increase in productivity. As you study your financial records and margins, you will be able to know the causes of the increased productivity, what areas to apply more work to, and how to create new strategies to up your productivity game.
5. Check Off Your Task List
As said earlier, your to-do/task list summarises the goals you intend to achieve within a period. The more tasks you check off your list, the more productive you are. So if you planned to do ten tasks today and finally did seven, that means you had 70% productivity. You could choose to up your game or stay on the mark. You should note that time is not necessarily a metric for productivity. This is because of the distractions that could come up while performing your tasks, and not everyone knows how to stay off distractions.
6. Check Output Quality
Besides ticking off your tasks or producing many results, how solid are your outputs? You can measure your productivity by checking how much quality or efficiency your results have. In this case, it is a qualitative check over a quantitative check.
Conclusion
Productivity is a driving force for growth, development, and wealth creation. So, you must measure your productivity and ensure that your efforts are paying off massively. This is why productivity metrics are very important.