What is productivity? by Paulie Sabol

One of my mentees popped online to ask me an unusual question.

What is productivity to you?

I decided to answer the question by opening up a white board on MSN Instant Messenger.

Here's what I drew

The first pitfall many people make is to mistake productivity for activity.

Being busy and growing a business are not the same thing at all. Being busy is about consuming your time with tasks. Building a business is about establishing a systems which delivers value to the marketplace through an exchange relationship. Simply, people give your business money to get something they experience as worth more than the money itself.

In a future blog, I'll write about how there are only two reasons people give you money.


The graph above shows, in fact, there are 3 ways you can be busy and not be building. They are, 1) inefficiency, 2) ineffectiveness, & 3) inconsiderate inconsistency.

The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy
is its inefficiency

I define being inefficient as doing the the right things in the wrong way. That is, inefficiency is waste, missed opportunity, and unproductive work on a worthwhile task & process.

Basically, you'd accomplish more, have more, and produce more if you could get better at what you're doing. Consequently, to overcome inefficiency, seek training in the specific skill are, in time management/project management, and/or employ higher quality tools of automation for the process itself, etc.

Much education is monumentally ineffective.
All too often we teach people to cut flowers
when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
John W. Gardner, secretary of Heath, Education and Welfare.

When a business is ineffective, it may be doing things right but they're the wrong things to be doing. Like the quote above, a business can often have perfect financial records, but have spent the money on personal expenses. Likewise, the marketing part of the business may be sending out direct mail packages and following up; however, the packages could be addressed to the wrong person or have an unappealing offer.

Unlike raising efficiencies, when you're being ineffective there's no advantage in doing the wrong thing even better! Rather than build skills, ineffective operations should be stopped, analyzed, and new procedures tested.

How can you know if you've found the right procedure? Is there a measure or sure-fire test to bring about effectiveness? Yes--results.

Correspondingly, if you're not getting the results you want but you are getting ample results (you're efficient) then you're being ineffective. To know you've made the relevant changes to your procedure, look for a change in your results.

Bear with me a little even if I am inconsiderate
and unmanageable and believe me
we will be very happy together
James Joyce

While this proposal for James Joyce may seem self-deprecating and sweet, to run a business that does the wrong things in the wrong way creased inconsistent and irrelevant results. A business that cannot render value predictably, and wouldn't likely do so because of flawed operations, may close a sale here and there but it will never have the repeat, residual back-end business that marks a sustainable enterprise.

To proceed with doing the wrong thing any ol' way is flatly inconsiderate of your clients. The average person will not so much care about your business until they know your business cares about them. Those few, desperate and unfortunate souls who buy from you won't come back.

Should you find yourself getting poor results and lots of waste. The course of action will be to stop operations and return to the high level strategic work of returning to, defining and refining the mission statement, purpose statement and outcome statements for your business.

Look to industry leaders, core competencies, and case studies to find the proper things to be doing and the ideal procedures for task completion.

Nothing makes a person more productive
than the last minute.

Two of my business mentors have recently named a seminar process they do and have shared with me "The Last Minute Millionaire" process.

This process, which will be the focused subject of a soon to be released book titled Cracking the Wealth Code or something similar, focuses on velocity and acceleration.

Ultimately, when your doing the right things, in the right way; you get the right results. At that point you might think your done! Not so.

There's still timing (the right time can mean everything) and "the right stuff" meaning the perfect match between you, the business activity, and purpose. Those two factors impact acceleration and velocity. The details of which will make an excellent future blog.