Understanding and Increasing Your Productivity

Understanding and increasing your productivity on a daily basis is one of the most crucial actions you can take in order to be successful in your entire personal life and professional career.

Before you can increase your productivity you must first understand what productivity means.

Productivity is an economic measure of output per unit of input.

Formula: Total Output / Total Input = Productivity Result

The next step is incorporating this formula to your daily routine (both in your personal life and business profession).

Increasing your productivity rate is literally as easy as it appears in the formula (total output / total input = productivity result).

Whether you are a business owner, sales representative, human resource manager, lawyer, doctor, teacher, student, stay-at-home parent, or any other category you can think of... This formula will help you look at your daily routine in a very simple way and hopefully give you an advantage for increasing your daily productivity.

For example... Let's say you are a sales representative for a company. How can you incorporate your productivity formula to increase your monthly sales? Here are the questions you need to ask yourself:

1. What is your total output?
2. What is your total input?

First, you need to understand and write down all of your processes and time it will take in order to process 1 sale. This means you must calculate all of the action items it must take you to research, conduct meetings, telephone calls, text messages, transportation, paperwork, and/or anything else that you must complete in order get 1 sale of Product A.

Second, you need to calculate the time it takes you in order to do all of the action items I mentioned above.

So your list should look like this:

1. Customer Research (10 Minutes)
2. Conduct Meetings (30 Minutes)
3. Telephone Calls (10 Minutes)
4. Text Messaging (10 Minutes)
5. Presentation (10 Minutes)
6. Paperwork (10 Minutes)
7. Transportation (30 Minutes)
8. Total Time = 1 Hour and 50 Minutes

This means it takes you on average of 1 Hour and 50 Minutes in order to get 1 sale of Product A for your company.

Next step: Increase Your Productivity

Time is money. In my opinion it is more important than money. Your time is the most valuable measure you have in your life. In order to increase your productivity means you must be more productive with your time.

Using the example I gave you above, look at each action item in the list and figure out how you can decrease the time it takes for each item. This is where your creativity will come into play.

Let's say you decrease your transportation to 20 minutes by driving during non-traffic times, remove text messaging to your customer because you already are speaking with them on the phone, reduce your meeting times to 15 minutes, and cut your research time to 5 minutes... This leaves you with shorter deliverable action items as mentioned below:

1. Customer Research (5 Minutes)
2. Conduct Meetings (15 Minutes)
3. Telephone Calls (10 Minutes)
4. Presentation (10 Minutes)
5. Paperwork (10 Minutes)
6. Transportation (20 Minutes)

Total Time = 1 Hour and 10 Minutes

By just editing a few items, you have decreased your daily input for one sale by 40 minutes!

Basically you decreased your average time it takes to make 1 sale of Product A by approximately 47%.

What does this mean? This means you freed up 47% of your daily routine for your sales position. Could you imagine what you would do if 47% of your day was all-of-a-sudden available for other things you have to finish? Or better yet, you use the 47% towards increasing more daily sales!

In conclusion, a lot of people in this world do not look at their time as being the most valuable measure for their daily lives. If you are one of these people, I strongly recommend you to sit down with a pen/paper and write down all of your daily action items you do for your personal life and profession with how much time it takes you to do each one of them. Afterwards, do an audit of your own time and figure out where you can create more of it! Because there are only 24 hours in one day. Use them wisely.

Now go and be more productive!

-David Brodine II