Productivity is important. But tracking it is even more.

Did you know that once you’ve been derailed from a task by an interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes, 15 seconds to get back on track? So when you unlocked your phone to check that notification, you also ended up flipping through those new headlines, checked out a new reel on Instagram, instantly sent a snap to maintain that streak, hopped onto LinkedIn to accept that connection you didn’t know, and then probably landed up on this blog to check out ways to optimize your productivity. I’ll give you those 15 seconds, just for the irony to sink in.

As the old adage goes, “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else”. Since time immemorial, productivity is one of the key aspects of help that we humans have been striving to tap, control & enhance. It’s easy to get stuff done, but it’s hard to get the right stuff done. Why? Because of all the times, when the things that aren’t right or required, end up obstructing your mind. Similarly keeping track of your time is easy. But keeping track of your tasks isn’t. In fact most of the time, we can’t gauge the extent of our productivity, because we never really end up tracking it. And then end up expending more energy in estimating the outcome of our efforts.

As mentioned earlier, at work, if an employee is interrupted it takes him/her about 23 minutes to get back to the task they were working on beforehand. So assume that on an average you got distracted/deviated from your task-at-hand around 5 times a day. In the end, you would stand to lose about 2 hours of your day in merely recouping back to routine! Seems preposterous right?

In fact, there’s even some research that suggests that on an average 8-hour day employees are productive for less than 3 hours. To add to this mounting pile of drainage, these levels of unproductivity are costing companies $550 Bn a year!

So how do you resolve something like this?
Well, it’s simple, you just need an effective way to track your productivity.
After all, if you don’t measure your productivity, how will you ever know if you’re working as efficiently as you hope?

A Harvard Business Review article argues that while most companies want to have maximum productivity, all teams are mostly hit by organizational barriers. Research shows that an average company loses more than 20% of its productive capacity, that’s more than a day each week — to “organizational drag.” A lot of times, the structures and processes that are put in place by companies to keep things on track actually take up time and prevent people from getting things done. So the only way to truly know how productive you are is to track yourself using metrics.

Companies that use a productivity monitoring system have about 10% more active daily work time. Not only was the clock-in accuracy larger by 15%, but the teams took 25% less time to complete their tasks as well. Naturally leading to it, productivity also grew by 26% to 32% and time reporting became 60% more accurate compared to before.

But how does tracking really affect productivity?

There are two main reasons that attribute towards it — deterrence and the Hawthorne effect. Deterrence is quite easy to decipher. Whenever people are afraid of being punished or reprimanded, they automatically act according to the rules, abide by the time given, and ensure that they meet the deadline. Another cause is the Hawthorne effect, named after an experiment that took place in Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works electric company in Illinois. Originally, the term was used to describe that research participants tend to behave differently during the research, since they’re aware that they’re being observed. Under observation, you almost always tend to put on your best behavior and deliver to your fullest capacity.

Now you’d think that this would make us or another employee imprisoned or constantly watched but it’s actually the contrary. Employees inherently want to be productive. They want to know that their hard work and effort are being channelized to help the company succeed. They also expect to see that the time they’re putting into the work matters and is worthless. After all, anything that you can measure, you can manage. And things that you can efficiently manage, end up mattering the most.

In a company, a productive team is a cornerstone to any successful business. But measuring how productive your team actually is more than just a gut feeling of how much work they’re getting done. Measuring and calculating your team’s productivity, just like you do with the other aspects of your business, is the only way to know if they’re reaching their full potential.