Understnding Productivity

Understanding Productivity

Sameer Dhobe

Productivity is basically a ratio output and input.

Productivity= output / input

Productivity is defined by many researchers in different way, according to me, most relevant is

Productivity=Value/Time

(productivity equals value divided by time)

By this definition there are two primary ways of increasing productivity:

1)Increase the value added.

2) Decrease the time required to create that value

We can complicate this definition by including other factors like energy and resources, but I prefer the simplicity of time because in most cases factors like energy and resources are reducible to time anyway. Time also makes it very easy to compare different levels of productivity, such as output per hour or per day.

Apparently we can make some significant gains on the time side. There are many personal productivity optimizations which, especially if we introduce them, will produce a massive net savings of time over the course of life. Consider our typing speed, for instance. If we invest the time to get our speed up to 90 words per minute or faster, it will be well worth the initial time investment if we happen to do a lot of typing over our lifetime, compared to allowing our speed to linger at 50 wpm or slower year after year. The extra hours of practice will be nothing compared to the time we save typing emails, letters, or product entries over the next few decades. Other time-based optimizations include improving our sleeping habits, minimizing commute time, or dropping time-wasting habits like smoking.

The main limit of time-based optimizations is that the optimization process requires an input of time itself. It takes time to save time. So the more time we invest in optimizing time usage, the greater our initial time investment, and the greater our need for a long-term payoff to justify that investment. This limit creates an upper bound for any time-based optimizations we attempt, in accordance with the...