Today I posted up a new article at the LifeHack website entitled: Are You a Productive Person? Look at the Number of People Who are Waiting on You to Get Back to Them.
The article makes the point that if you look at how many people are waiting for you to get back to them, it can give you an idea of the overall health of your time management system.
But in addition to the total number of people, you can go even deeper and determine the quality of that list and learn even more.
For example how many are actually overdue? What is the longest wait time? What is the average time it takes for you to respond when there is no explicit promise made?
My hope is that one day, Outlook makes it easy to capture metrics like these, because there is an ugly secret I am continually confronting as I launch MyTimeDesign: there is no standard, measurable way to measure individual productivity, or the quality of one’s time management system.
This is part of the reason why there’s so much hype around time management programs — one promises even to “triple your productivity.” Of course, they make no mention of how it is to be measured in the first place, let alone “post-improvement!”
Over at the MyTimeDesign blog, I have been putting together the descriptions of the features and benefits of the MyTimeDesign programs, which will be launched next week. One thing I am trying to be careful about is not to over-hype the program, and make promises that can’t be fulfilled.
Stay tuned for more on this, as I am coming up with a more realistic way to describe ways in which participants can tell whether the program is for them or not.