i.e in your personal/professional life before OF and after - how much more productive were you?
I know I’m better of not losing track of item and dropping ball - but by how much am I more productive? I’m not sure.
I’m looking forward to solid metrics in your reply :)
I know I am not less productive and very little falls through the cracks and that is the main benefit of OF for me.
Pre OF invoices would get delayed in being issued, client tasks would be forgotten or be late and for me that is reason enough.
I think productivity is vey hard to measure especially in my business (web dev) where systems change dramatically very quickly. In fact dev time for a “finished “ product has probably more than doubled but the quality of the product has also dramatically improved in the last few years.
For me comparisons are pretty meaningless, what OF does give me is peace of mind and therefore I am in a better place to do better work but probably not more productive work.
The ‘productivity’ gains from software once assumed to be self-evident and significant have always proved elusive in practice, even at aggregate macro-economic levels of analysis.
It may be that any real impacts of software tend to be more qualitative than quantitative (extending reach, rather than quantity).
Any competitive advantage is likely to be very short-lived, because everyone else is raising quality and expectations (enabled by software) at the same time.
what OF does give me is peace of mind
Yes. I don’t think I get more done necessarily but I don’t miss essential stuff.
I think we sometimes get caught up in measuring the incorrect statistic.
It’s not about getting the number of tasks done that matter. It’s about getting the right tasks done that matter.
Maybe you can use @heyscottyj 's charity workflow for iOS to measure tasks completed to get a general idea of how many tasks you are completing on a daily or weekly basis?
I found myself tricking myself into thinking i’m productive by creating a tasks and ticking off immediately just to record that I did something. It may not be the right tasks done but it was a task nonetheless. If it was a 2 minute task that I wanted to get done, I wouldn’t bother recording it into OmniFocus and then checking it off. I’d just do it. It might be worthwhile if I had to report to someone higher up the chain but I’m not in that scenario.
The question now becomes: Are you getting the right tasks done? That’s the important measure of productivity. This would be hard to measure. The ultimate measure for me is if the project is completed or how many more tasks remain for me to work on before project completion.
I would say that OF lets me get the same amount of work done in a shorter amount of time. That’s mostly due to perspectives, although entering and completing tasks is of course required to make perspectives work.
I don’t enter everything I do into OF, so doing the OF portion of the work faster frees me up to do the rest and to enjoy leisure time. Definitely an improvement!
@vnkatesh , what would be considered qualitative to you? Are there are certain stats that means more to you?
I’m trying to remember about what would be measurable. I’m not conversant in scrum but I think there are scores that measures how important/relevant a certain task or sprint is. Maybe that’s a starting point for you to figure out what you want to measure?
I’m in tech engineering, so number of bugs solved/tickets completed done before OF vs after would’ve been a good quantitative number.
But (un)fortunately, my scope of work and responsibilities increased with rank - the above isn’t the only measure of my increased productivity.
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