What is the real meaning of productivity?
One of the most cited definitions about productivity is that it is the amount of output as results per unit of input as a labour, equipment and capital.
It is total output from one unit of a total input. For example, the numbers of hours as input need to produce a product as output or result from the factory.
Historically, it was and still is one of the most important economically measurement, or indicator of the success of economic systems. But, today it is something that we all need everything around us.
We need it in our personal life. We need it in our business life. We need it in our business. We need it in our team working. We need it in our family. We need it when we work on our computers. The need is everywhere.
I will talk about different meanings here, but one of the most important subjects on My Productivity Tools will be the work done in a certain period of time.
The Purpose of Productivity
Because we talk about the ratio between output and input, we know that the purpose is to have a greater number mathematically from that equation.
For example, if we need three hours to produce 10 units of products, the productivity will be 3,33 expressed in numbers. However, if we can increase that number to 5, we will need to have only two hours to produce 10 products. For an additional hour of our work, we will have five products more produced. If improve that number to be 10, we can produce 30 products for three hours. You can see the impact of productivity and these three examples in the graphic below.
As we can see from the graphic, our purpose or the purpose on every system where we measure productivity is to make it much bigger.
How We Can Improve the Productivity
Because it is a measurement received from the output and input of the system we can focus on the following possible improvements:
- Improvements of the input of the system. Many times increasing of the productivity can be part of the improvements of the inputs. For example, better suppliers can bring decreased time of processing the parts.
- Improvements in the subsystems of the system. Efficiency of the system will depend on the organization of different subsystems in the main system.
- Results and the real meaning. Do we really need such a result? Do we really need all of that features? Do our customers need all of that features?
Many improvement aspects will depend on these measurements. If we want to make more results, but to spend a small amount of time, or our effort, we need to be more organized, we need to use better tools that will improve our work, we need to be more focused on our work, we need to know what we want to achieve.
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