How Productive Are You? Calculate Your Churn Rate

Producitivy is something I struggle with at times. Calculating your church will determine if you are busy and unproductive or busy and productive.

By calculating your own churn rate, you can determine, precisely, how effective you are and how this effectiveness changes over time and different types of projects. The details of this calculation are as follows:

1. Make a list of active projects that are important to you to complete. These should not be projects that have deadlines. Instead, make them the optional work that would really help you get ahead if completed. Each should require around 1 – 2 weeks of fairly regular attention to complete. If it requires more, break it up into smaller chunks. If it requires less, don’t include it — it’s a task, not a project. Overall, you should have between 4 – 8 projects on this list.

2. Over the next 3 -6 weeks, try to work only on the active projects on your list. You’ll still have to complete deadline-driven work, of course, but don’t get seduced by a new idea and add it to your list until you’ve completed what is already there.

3. After around 3 weeks you can start calculating your churn rate as often as you like. The formula is as follows:

CR = [(number of completed projects from list)/(days elapsed since start of list)] * 100

Source