How Productive Are You?

I’m obsessed with productivity: being as productive as possible and helping others discover how to be as well. But I loathe to say so. Why? Because productivity is a misused term that is all too often banded around corporate offices, yet rarely measured. In companies world-wide, people flippantly talk about being productive without knowing what that really means. In simple terms, labor productivity is the output per hour worked. Do you know what your productivity rate is?

Research consistently concludes that we have an idealized view of how productive we are. If you’re like nearly everyone else in the world, you produce far less per hour than you think you do—and certainly less than you can.

Embarrassingly, I have experienced this first hand in the midst of writing my next book. While I write, I like to listen to loud music with a zippy tempo to support my writing cadence. Typically, I drown out the lyrics of the song that is playing and only rely on the tempo, but for some reason, one of Rihanna’s songs recently caught my attention. I have no idea why, but I was intrigued to find out how old she was.

To satisfy my curiosity, I paused my writing for a brief moment and turned to Google (a tool I suspect of being a prime productivity thief). Before I knew it, I had wasted two hours of my writing time and had learned more about Rihanna than I ever wanted to know. What makes this all the more embarrassing is the fact that I was also working on a productivity project for a client at the time. Productivity was front and center in my mind, but far away from my reality.

If you were to ask me, I would proudly admit that I’m more productive than others, even if I can’t substantiate it. I want to believe that I’m well above average, yet my Google search for Rihanna’s age—which incidentally, I can’t remember now—suggests otherwise.

My personal anecdote is indicative of a wider issue: we have a productivity problem, in large part because we don’t actually measure it. If you don’t measure your productivity, you don’t know if you are productive or not. Nor do you know how you compare to others, or if your productivity is increasing with time. Ideally, you should be able to produce more per hour worked over time, but without measuring, there’s no way of knowing for sure.

If you want to know how productive you are, you need to add up the hours you work in a year. If you work an eight-hour day, multiply 40 (hours per week) by 52 (weeks per year). Next, deduct days off for holidays and leave. In the UAE, this equates to an annual total of 1,760 working hours per year. Finally to work out your productivity rate, divide what you produce by that number.

Let’s say I write 89,000 words per year. In this case, my productivity rate would be 50 words per hour. Now, I don’t write every hour of every day—nor do I try to—but, unlike Googling useless trivia, the time I spend researching and thinking contributes to my productivity as an author.

 The reason you may not be measuring your productivity is that you haven’t really thought about what you should produce per hour. Zeroing in on that is a first step towards becoming more productive. If you’re in sales, you should measure sales per hour worked. A recruiter should measure recruits. It might seem obvious, but how many of us actually think about the work we do in hourly terms?

What is it that you should be producing? Why does your job exist? When you answer these questions, you can calculate how productive you are. Then you can work on boosting that productivity every year by reducing the time-wasting drags and improving your ability so that you can produce more in the same amount of time.

Stop loosely throwing the word “productivity” around the office and instead substantiate what it means, do the calculation, and make the most of every hour. That is when you will become truly productive. 

Printed originally in Gulf News (4 September 17)

A thinker, speaker, and writer to the core, Dr. Tommy holds a doct.orate in strategic leadership from Regent University, and is the founder of Emerging Markets Leadership Center (EMLC) where he is the region's leading CEO Coach. In addition to writing a number of books—including the Amazon #1 best-seller, Leadership Dubai Style and 10 Tips for Leading in the Middle East, Dr. Tommy is the editor-in-chief of Emerging Markets Business—The Authoritative Review.

Follow me on twitter @tommyweir or visit www.tommyweir.com for more of my thoughts on leadership.