Skill & Focus : Productivity501
If most of your work is repetitive or easily quantifiable, it is easy to measure your productivity against yourself. You just consider how many of units of work you accomplished in a given amount of time. Unfortunately, most work doesn’t lend itself to this type of measurement.
If we could measure both our skill level and our focus level on any task, we should be able to have a pretty good idea of our productivity. This type of measurement isn’t a hard numbers approach, but it is a good exercise in becoming aware of where we are functioning in relation to where we could be functioning.
- In evaluating any piece of work, we need to be aware of our skill level.
- we may need to educate or train ourselves in order to increase our skill level.
- Unless I’m willing to make learning a skill my primary focus, I’m unlikely to ever develop the same level of skill as someone who uses that skill to make a living.
- You should have a good idea of your skill level for your common types of work. This gives you an idea of where you should place your development energies and also can help you decide what tasks are best outsourced.
- The other component of our personal effectiveness is focus. While you may have a very high skill level at a particular task, your efficiency will be determined by your ability to focus. Your focus level may depend on your mood, the time of day, distractions, and whether or not you really want to do the task at hand.
- For most tasks, operating at 25% focus will take you at least 4 times as long as if you gave it 100% focus.
- Most of us are rarely able to operate at high levels of focus for more than 30 to 40 minutes at a time. When you are operating at 90% to 100% focus it is very exhausting. Most people are doing very well to operate at 60% to 75% focus.
Efficiency Percentage
By combining these two numbers, we should get a realistic idea of where we are operating in relation to our potential. So, if I have a 20% skill level at preparing my taxes and I’m trying to work on them while watching a TV show that is occupying 50% of my focus, I am operating at 10% efficiency toward achieving my goal. 90% of my efforts are being wasted through lack of skill and through distractions.
In this particular example, I can turn off the television and possibly increase my focus to 75%. This would raise my efficiency to 15%, but that still leaves 85% wasted. The only way for me to really become efficient at this task is to spend some time increasing my skill level.
- Obviously you shouldn’t break out a calculator to determine your efficiency for each and every task, but being aware of these two factors can help you make better decisions about how you spend your time. By minimizing the areas where your time is wasted, you’ll be able to devote more effort to the areas where you have an advantage over the average individual.
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