So What Actually Is Personal Productivity?

One simple way to think about personal productivity is that of completing more actions that move you closer to accomplishing your goals, in a manner that brings balance and ease into your life.

What is Self productivity? On a personal level, being your most productive self means: thinking about what you aspire to get done, figuring out what you are physically capable of getting done in an optimal environment, and. following through on creating an optimal environment and completing the necessary tasks to achieve your goals.

Why is personal productivity important? Personal productivity has a direct impact on the quantity and quality of the results that we produce. In general, if we have high productivity, we feel in control because our daily tasks are completed, we have a sense of achievement and progress, which lead to the associated positive change in our brain chemistry 

How do you measure personal productivity? In the majority of work that I do, productivity is qualitative rather than quantitative, especially when it comes to trying to accurately measure people’s belief/behaviour change.

As a guide for my productivity, and one that I share with clients for consideration:

Productivity isn’t about how many tasks you accomplish, but about how significant and what value those tasks have. Busyness doesn't come with a badge of honour!

Calculating your personal productivity ratio. For those people who like the numbers and want the stats to substantiate things like personal productivity (including me), there are, have been and no doubt will be several different theories and hypothesis. It's not for me to say which are right or wrong, I subscribe to the experiment of one, so it’s essentially about finding something that works for you.

Personally, I’m a practitioner of the 80/20 Principle. When it comes to my working week, I also like the simplicity and accuracy of the personal productivity ratio:

Hours spent on productive tasks, divided by total hours worked.

How can personal productivity be improved? As with most things to do with people, I subscribe to the view that it should be an experiment of one. We have to do the work to establish what works for us personally. As a simple, generic overview, and areas for consideration, take a read of my short article How To Maximise Personal Productivity, which looks at some effective personal and professional areas of productivity for consideration if you aspire to "do less, better".