How to measure Productivity?

“Today I got a lot done“.

How many times have you said or heard this phrase and how do you define that? How to measure productivity?
It isn’t always so easy to tell because sometimes it’s not about quantity but about quality. You may have spent your entire day thinking about a critical problem and eventually “solved” it by knowing what you have to do next. You may have gotten only to the next step. Would you still say you got a lot done?

Crossing of as many points as possible from your to-do list is surely fun and makes your body produce endorphins (the happy chemical), but what about the difficult and time-consuming tasks that may take longer than a day to accomplish?
What if you didn’t get anywhere today, but BECAUSE of the whole thinking you’ve done today you’ll accomplish something next week or next month?

How do we give credit?

How do we give credit to those accomplishments?
They’re not on our to-do list, there is simply nothing to cross off, but we still spend time on the task…

I wish there were a progress bar somewhere, like those you find in video games.
No matter if you achieve something or not, just spending time on a subject makes your experience level go up.
I think it works like that in real life too, but it’s just hard to see and quantify. That is why sometimes we all go home, feeling that we have accomplished nothing. But that’s simply not fair and it doesn’t reflect the reality. Just because we can’t cross something off of our to-do list today or brag about how many things we’ve got done, it doesn’t mean that we have done less or lower quality work than somebody else.

Why is there this constant need of measuring “how much” and “how many”? What if we can’t tell, just not yet?

Not everything is quantifiable

There are so many things that are just not measurable in the immediate. Exercise every day but you will see the results later, eat healthy and you will eventually live longer. Read more books and you will eventually get smarter. How do you quantify this?

It takes endurance, patience and trust in yourself and the consciousness that you’re making progress, even if you can’t see it yet.
That is why we need people around us that value the time and effort that people spent on something, instead of just numbers and results. Those will come later.