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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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Michael and Jason from Black Belt Productivity have asked a few productivity writers to weigh in on a comment that was posted at BBP a short while back. The commenter was looking for advice on how to measure the effectiveness of a productivity program:

Hi! My name is Mayra. I work as a Black Belt in a Mexican company. I want to know the best way to measure the performance of a BB. I mean, Which metrics are the most appropriate way to prove that a BB is reaching his/her objectives in the company (# of projects, savings, etc)? Thanks for your help!

The short answer is “all of them”.

The long answer is, measure everything. Then select those tasks and activities that promote your objectives and track them for improvement. The next question is how to do this in the framework of your Getting Things Done practice, since GTD does not have a specific process for measuring productivity improvement.

The good news is that GTD does include a mechanism for creating your own measurement tools.

Adaptive Productivity Management

The beauty of the GTD system, for me and many others, is that it is remarkably flexible in its application. Digital or analog, PDA or Moleskine, there are nearly as many methods of executing the GTD practice as there are practitioners!

The core principles that make the GTD method so effective are the Workflow Process and the Weekly Review. With these two tools you can get a grip on your inputs and outflow, and track your progress from beginning to end. The specific methods of implementing these tools are up to you, from a master to-do list all the way up to the design of your workspace.

Lets do a quick review of these fundamental principles and see how they can be used as a device for measuring one’s productivity.

Collect

Process

Organize

Review

Do

These 5 steps in the GTD workflow, when iterated regularly, are enough to improve your personal productivity and help you accomplish the things that need to get done.

In order to measure the results of your program and the success of its implementation, you will need to create your own, personal process map.

My workflow diagram looks something like this:

Select Something to Measure

Thus, when it comes to measuring any part of your workflow, there is a built-in template for picking a component and recording your progress. Select any one of your activities, e-mail management for example, and record how much time you spend on that activity. Alternatively, you can create a time log and record how you spend your workday on all of your activities.

The important thing is to keep this measurement in context. Without a starting point, you cannot measure anything. And if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. [*note*] This initial piece of information will be your baseline with which you will compare to measurements you make in the future. The time to compare these two sets of measurements is the Weekly Review.

Before and After

The differences, if any, in the two measurements is a quantitative expression of how productivity has improved. For example, say that our sample employee spends one hour every morning responding to e-mail before starting with their other tasks (measured before implementing the GTD process). At the end of the first week, they can measure again and record any improvement. This process can happen every week for a month, at which point a trend should have appeared. For the sake of our example let’s say that learning to deal with e-mail in a productive manner has reduced this initial e-mail processing time to 30 minutes daily.

This quantitative measure of time saved can be expressed in units of time, wages, or even increased billable hours spent on other work.

There is also a qualitative measure of productivity improvement, which I consider to be even more important. The ability to get your work done and go live your life should be the driving force behind all of your productivity practices.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5e94x4. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen