MeasureProductivity

This article discusses a few steps by which an individual can effectively measure his or her productivity levels with the help of few simple steps. It also introduces and defines productivity in brief.

For big companies, productivity may be measured in various highly complicated ways that employ the help of mathematical formulas. This is in order for them to have picture of how their company is doing. If you as an individual employee are looking to measure your own productivity level and you don’t want all the hoopla that your company is making, then this article is the right one for you. Here, you will be aided to determine your own productivity level through simple methods.

Before we start measuring your productivity levels, let us first look at what productivity really is. Productivity is the rate of output for every input (in this case - time). The units of output may differ from situation to situation, but time is always a constant. No matter what the output is (poetry, cars, billboards, etc.) Time will continue to remain the constant factor when it comes to productivity. The more output is produced for a constant period of time, the more productive something is.

So, let us now turn our focus into determining how productive you are as an individual in the workplace or in your personal life. Below are steps that you can follow to easily determine your productivity level.

Step one – Determine your units. It is helpful to know what you are working with. If for example you are wondering how productive you are in knitting scarves. Your units may be yards of finished scarf over an hour. Another set of units for the same example may be the number of scarves knitted in an uninterrupted 4 hour period. No matter what units you have, you can use the following examples as your guide to create your own units or what is often called metrics.

Step Two – Observation and Note Taking. During this step, all you have to do is to observe what your output is and to jot it down. The data that you gather at this step will be the determining factors to measure your productivity level.

Step 3 – The computation. This step need not strike fear in the non-mathematically inclined because this process only employs division and you can access the help of a calculator for this step. To start, take the number of output that you have gathered. Let us assume that you wanted to determine how many scarves you are able to finish in an uninterrupted 4 hour period. Let us say that the output is 40 knitted scarves in a period of 4 hours. What you need to do now is to divide the output which is 40 by the time it took you to finish it, which in this case is an uninterrupted 4 hours, and then we can determine that your productivity level is 10 scarves/ hour.

The units mentioned above may be replaced by any type of unit that you choose. Only the units should change while the process of measuring productivity remains the same. The results for productivity measurement may be used to maintain or to improve your productivity level and in turn your performance as a whole.