How does productivity tools makes you productive?
Productivity is one of the major problems in the economic world right now. A number of formulas and methodologies are designed by industry professionals to crack productivity.
Well, the thing is very simple.
Staying productive is hard, unless and until you wire it inside your brain.
Because your brain has a lot to do with your productivity. You can’t stay productive and tired at the same time, espresso is actually playing inside your brain to make you active, which is directly proportional to productivity. According to Hebbian theory, it says “The nerves that fire together, wire together”.
It’s all about consistent practice and efforts to convert a new activity into a long-lasting habit. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a bad habit like smoking or a good habit like reading, the working methodology is pretty same according to science.
Productivity
Productivity isn’t really about avoiding procrastination, it’s all about finding your time and focus (not space-time though) and putting it in place with respect to the objective. Thousands of formulas and methodologies exist in the real world that points towards productivity growth and actions to be taken in order to become productive.
Only very few work in the real world.
Methodologies are designed not only to improve personal productivity but also to grow the company as a whole. Since a very long time, companies and human resource managers are trying to figure out methods to improve team productivity which indeed turned out to be the most important objective for the internal growth of the company.
But the key starts with,
Measurement
Consultants are mostly number based people, they always measure something before making a decision about the objective. The best in class productivity applications around the market right now are designed by intensely studying the numbers. When the numbers are written down into a piece of paper which is a doc, it will be then converted into a table which is nothing but a spreadsheet. These numbers tell a story which then becomes the wiki of developing productivity with comparison to target numbers.
If the spreadsheet says that you’re most productive on days with a vegetarian meal than on the days with non-vegetarian, then obviously there is something wrong with your diet with respect to your work. You should try and change it! Maybe something with 50-50 proportion of vegetarian and non-vegetarian would solve the problem.
Tools
When the hunters and gatherers measured the problems that could occur while eating bare meat, overtime they understood that they need some kind of a solution. The innovative find out of the fire and its practical purpose for survival was revolutionary like anything.
The power of tools expands our ability to do something which is above our limits. 100% of the tools (especially productivity tools) rely on numbers to predict the quality and reliability of your work. When the spreadsheet helped millions of businesses to record their data, the numbers started telling stories within the minds of managers and business heads.
Tools are basically forms which take input from your activities. It could be reading your work time, the tools you make use of and maybe your speed depending on the type of tool you’re using. There are multiple tools out there which really changed the world, word processor and spreadsheets are still changing the world with precise data.
In fact, companies like Notion, Airtable, etc has redesigned the entire word processor and spreadsheet to a whole new level with interactive templates to improve your productivity. Your devices are tracking your time schedules, calendar appointments, and to-do list by converting them to numbers in order to predict solutions that might help you understand yourself better.
Artwork
Just to summarise, the art of productivity happens when you figure out the numbers and find the problems within the numbers. Once, you have got the numbers, you can figure out the problems and set a target number to achieve. When you have a target number, you just have to develop the action plan to achieve that number in order to achieve the objective within a timeline.
Now, when you’ve all these numbers figured out, you can start downloading your favorite tools to note down the numbers and then track where the numbers are traveling to. It could be sales growth, personal productivity, team productivity or the entire business productivity, everything ends up in numbers.
The art is all about figuring out the numbers and executing them nicely. To finish with examples, famous brands use tools to record their employee’s work time, todo list apps help you get clarity about your pending works, workflow software helps your design process to automate your business hence saving tons of hours and more to go.
Well, let’s not forget the calculator which makes sense all over the place.
