When we have mastered the art of time management and have acquired the habit of creating and maintaining a schedule, effectively utilising the time we have while wasting nothing, we have reached a stage where we should start reviewing our calendar and start discovering answers to the following questions:
How often do we take a break, reflect, and analyse our calendar to discover the answers to these questions? If we could somehow quantify our productivity into some mathematical number and measure everything against it, we could easily track where we stand and if we are making progress as days or months pass, or even better, we could even plot a graph of our productivity over time. But can we really do this? Is it possible to quantify our productivity in the form of a mathematical number? We’ll explore this in the next chapter.
In the previous chapter we introduced the MARIGOLD framework for task categorization and prioritisation, which divides our daily tasks into maintenance, amusement, risk analysis and mitigation, investment, growth, obsolescence, and delegation tasks. We also established the priority of these categories and which activity deserves more of our time. If we were to start following this and give more focus to priority items first, our schedule would tune itself for the maximum possible result it could produce. This is the first step towards greater efficiency.
Doing Periodic Reviews of Our Calendar
One of the reasons we measure something is that we want to improve it over time. It is not just a one-time activity but has to be done periodically so that we can make sense of the data and take action to improve it. Therefore, we need to get into the habit of doing periodic reviews of our schedule. We can do it at an interval that suits us best. It can be done daily, weekly, or monthly—whatever makes us comfortable. In these periodic reviews, we need to check where our time is going. Are we wasting time on low-ROI activities, or are we spending too much time on maintenance tasks and so on?
Let’s assume that for us, doing a weekly review of our calendar works best instead of doing it daily or monthly. So once a week, we can reflect on our calendar and see how we did over the last week. We can use the following template to measure our outcome: It contains a set of questions that we must ask ourselves.
Once you start to get into the habit of doing periodic reviews of your schedule, you will be able to easily identify high- and low-outcome tasks in your calendar, what mistakes can be avoided, and how performance can be improved. The next step is to quantify your outcome with a mathematical number by building a scorecard.
Building a Performance Scorecard:
It is advised to rate our performance by quantifying it into a number or scorecard because, without it, our analysis would be too subjective and unable to give us a clear understanding of whether we are improving over time or not. It is a mental trick that makes it easy on the brain to compare two things. Our goal should be to improve our performance scorecard as we do a periodical review of our schedule and analyse productivity.
We can design this the way we like; we can rate our performance as a number score out of ten, or we can give ourselves grades like A+, A, B+, B, etc. Additionally, we give higher ranking or marks to higher ROI activities, and vice versa. This can be tracked over a period of time to analyse the trend and see if we are getting better or not.
The Power Score:
If you are looking for a simple template to measure performance you can do it with the help of the POWER score. Which is described as
Efficiency = Priorities + Obsolete + Who + Expansion + Risk and Resilience
Calculating the power score
When doing your periodic review, you can score yourself out of 10 for each one of these parameters and ask yourself questions like
This means your maximum score is 50 and your minimum is 0. This POWER score will help you give marks to your performance and will make it easy to understand if you are getting better. If you multiply your score by 2, you will get your score in percentage, which is far better than marks out of 50. For example, if you rate yourself as 8+3+6+6+5, your score will be 28/50, or 56%.
This gives you a concrete mathematical number to measure your efficiency. You can keep tracking this and make efforts to improve your scorecard over time. You can also plot this on a graph, which will tell you whether you are improving or not.
When people first start measuring their POWER score, they realise that they are not spending much time on their top priorities, nor are they able to spend time on building leverage. Most of their time is spent either doing maintenance tasks or fighting one crisis after another, and if they get any time on a good day, at best they are able to knock out some growth- or investment-related tasks, which is good, but they are still not the highest-outcome tasks. In the beginning, a low POWER score is OK, but over time it should improve.
If you are looking for a technology partner, rather than just another outsourcing agency; have a chat with one of our co-founders, Bharat or Aashish. Let's talk about how we can support your business' software requirements.