Starting out with just a vague idea on how to design the system itself, I tried fair amount apps that incorporated various approaches on the productivity and time management (such as Gantt charts) in their products, however, I wasn't exactly satisfied with their functionality. Don't get me wrong they were pretty ok but they were not that I needed. One needs to be comfortable with a productivity tool he uses otherwise, he will grow tired of it in almost no time.
After failing to find a suitable productivity app, I was left with the last resort - The "good, old" excel spreadsheet.
(Disclaimer) Just to make it clear: there are lots of great productivity/time management apps such as Wunderlist or Save my time but they have one problem. Successfully managing your life is a particularly difficult task, and these apps are really good at the aspect of productivity management but they don't offer that much value in the other aspects. In addition to that, It's really hard to keep an eye on all the things you are doing, when you have your productivity management scattered all over the place in multiple productivity apps without having some kind of "master tool" that brings all the data and contents together in a meaningful way that produces extra value for a user.
As far as I am concerned the best "master tool" that is available to me at the moment is a simple excel spreadsheet. I collected all the data stockpiled in numerous services I used over the course last 2 months and I put it all together. As of now, the document itself is about 80% completed but it's in a usable state. With its assistance, I am able to track:
a) how I spend my time throughout the week
b) how many habits I complete/fail throughout the week
c) how many tasks I complete/fail throughout the week
I take all this data and feed it into the "pseudo-algorithm" I created, I can track how productive was my week with higher objectivity than before. The final output from the spreadsheet looks something like this:
Total weekly value: 17201.11 (9732.11 last week, mean = 10686.87)
Weekly value (tasks): 7946.5 (4479.3 last week, mean = 4713.32)
Weekly value (habits): 4203 (3442 last week, mean = 3838.2)
Weekly value (time): 5051.61 (1810.81 last week, mean = 2137.35)
The "total weekly value" is an indication of how productive my week was. I assigned a certain value to every task/habit I accomplished throughout the week as well as to every single hour I lived through last week (values of these items ranged from 2 to 200). The rest stays pretty much the same but it's more accurate and I can more easily compare accomplishments of this week to the ones I had last week or simply compare this week's performance to the mean of other week's performances or particular weeks themselves.
Tasks completed:
91 (58 last week, mean = 78.6)
Habits completed:
126 (112 last week, mean = 117.6)
Habits failed:
17 (26 last week, mean = 19)
Time management:
~47.5 h of sleep (49 h last week, mean = 49.49h)
~61.4 h of self-imposed work (58.5 h last week, mean = 54.22 h)
~6.8 h of desired leisure (12 h last week, mean = 12.44 h)
~14.5 h of wasted leisure (18 h last week, mean = 17.9 h)
~4.8 h of required work (7 h last week, mean = 9.44 h)
~15.2 h of leisure involving people (9.5 h last week, mean = 9.87 h)
~17.8 h of utility (14 h last week)
Meaningful hours per day*: 11.92 h (11.93 h last week, mean = 11.02 h)
* hours spent on either self-imposed work, desired leisure or socializing per day
Interestingly enough, according to the stats I've come up with, it looks like I was 76% more productive this week than I was last week. Although it can probably be deduced from looking at the tasks completed and my habit/time management but this way I can get a more accurate overview of my accomplishments.
Regarding this week, the obvious price I paid for my increased productivity was what spent about half of the time (compared to the last week) on a meaningful leisure. Surprisingly, I didn't spend that much more time at work yet I had much better results. One last thing I would like to point out is that I spent about twice as much time on socializing as I did last week which is funny because for me - a rather introverted person - socializing drains a lot of my energy so I tend to avoid when I need to work on a high impact tasks on that particular day. Funnily enough - according to the stats - I actually did better when I socialized more last week. Of course, correlation does not mean causality but it got me genuinely surprised.
So, to sum it up: upon implementing this new system to measure my productivity, I obtained much more accurate data to work with. I sincerely hope that it will help me to correct the course of my actions in the long-term and will be worth the extra effort I'll be required to put in every week, in order to generate the additional stats.
The algorithm itself is rather dull therefore it's probably not worth explaining its inner workings but I'll probably elaborate on it in one of my future posts in which I'll be presenting you with my approach on structuring time, energy and attention that's at your disposal each time you wake up.
Hope you are having a good time.
Cheers
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