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To Get Things Done, Know Your Metric
The key to productivity isn’t saving time—it’s measuring it
Have you ever had one of those days where you feel super accomplished but then you look back and see that you have done … not a lot? Or, conversely, you chastise yourself at the end of the day for being unproductive, but when you write down the things you have achieved, you’re actually pretty proud of the list.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about productivity is that my brain sometimes plays tricks on me. My perception is rarely reality because my view of my own productivity lives in a soup of feelings, history, and preconceived notions.
I have found that, if I don’t write down what I want to accomplish and then check in later with whether I actually did it, I really don’t have an accurate picture of how productive I have been.
The fact of the matter is, in the brilliant words of Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
But there’s more to that because you can’t measure things until you know how you are measuring them (days, words, number of phone calls made, minutes worked out). Getting specific about measuring your productivity is one of the best ways to raise your game in any industry.
