Productivity and Value

Productivity is one of the keys to a CorePowered business.  In a traditional job you are typically paid based on the amount of time you spend at work, i.e. by the hour, annual salary.  One of the big switches for an entrepreneur is the realization that you are paid (or should be, if you’re not we need to talk) based on the value you provide your customers and clients.  One of our principles is equal value exchange.  A job that provides $1,000 worth of value to your client is worth $1,000 regardless of whether you spent 1 hour or 10,00 hours to create your client offering (service or product).  You can see how valuable productivity becomes when you are approaching income generation from this mindset!

We need to use our time wisely, operating at maximum productivity.  And this is important not only for income generating projects but all aspects of our life.  No that’s not to say that we are always operating at full speed, it means that we are always making a conscious decision as to how we are spending our time and that we are producing our desired results, even if those are results are to rest and reenergize.

What is Productivity?

So what is productivity?   It is the amount of relevant output we are creating based on our desired outcome/goal.  As you can see productivity becomes a mute point if we haven’t first defined our desired outcome or goal.  One of my favorite sayings about planning is “How will you know when you get there, if you don’t know where you are going?”  Understanding your productivity first requires that you define your goals and strategy for accomplishing them. (See Creating a Purpose-Driven Plan)

Metrics

Then we need to define our Key Performance Metrics (KPI).  KPIs are the indicators we will watch to determine if we are meeting our goals or not.  Common KPIs are financial metrics such as average revenue per customer or number of widgets produced per month, but on a daily basis it can be as simple as want percentage of my assigned task did I accomplish today.

I tell you it’s a real eye-opener to take a week and just keep a log of what you do every hour.  Without an agenda and set objectives, you’ll be surprised at how little you actually accomplish that is strategic in meeting your defined goals and objectives.  We’ll talk later this month about how to overcome this and create a method for operating at maximum productivity!  We’ll also talk more about KPIs and setting some of the less traditional CorePowered success measurements that aren’t quite so easy to quantify.

For now it’s important that you realize that productivity is key to a successful CorePowered enterprise and that you first need to define goals and objectives so that we have a plan to measure your productivity against.

Let me know your productivity tips and how you define productivity!