How to get 25% more done

 Did you know that improving your productivity by 25% means you gain two additional working hours a day, three extra months a year or a free additional team member for a team of four.

It's not about working more, it's about getting more done.

25% might just be the amount of extra capacity you need to finally clean up that document you keep getting annoyed by or implement that feature that never seems to make it into the planning. 25% is the equivalent of that extra team member you always wanted but could never fit in the budget.

How is that possible?

Imagine that every day, you spend 30 seconds less than the day before to complete a similar amount of work. That gives you 30 seconds extra to spend on something else. I realize that 30 seconds is not a lot and won't let you complete anything substantial. However, those 30 seconds on a daily basis will accumulate over the course of a year to 25% of every working day.

Nothing is for free

You might have already noticed that we are ignoring an important aspect here. Improvement will not happen only because you want it to. You need to invest time in changing how you work. Imagine that you invest 15 minutes a day to figure out how you will gain 30 seconds tomorrow. This gives you a realistic basis for real continuous improvement.

Then you can use the simplified formula below to understand the impact of your investment over time. It calculates the productivity on day n assuming a daily investment of I (as percentage of daily capacity, so for a 1 hour investment of an 8 hour working day I is 1/8) and daily gain of G (again as percentage of daily capacity).

1 + G * n/2 - I

When you start investing time into continuous improvement, you will lose some productivity. This is normal. After all, you need to think about what to improve and change how you work to get the benefits.  This takes time. But for a daily investment of 15 minutes which results in a daily improvement of 30 seconds, you will notice that after only 60 days, you have regained your entire investment! By then you will have improved so much that you have made 30 minutes per day available to work on something else, to get more done. If you keep investing 15 minutes of that time on a daily basis for an entire year, you will have 2 hours extra capacity per day, or a total return on investment of more than 9%!    

What is holding you back?

It takes dedication - and courage sometimes - to set aside those 15 minutes every single workday and focus on continuous improvement, no matter what happens, even if it requires you to say no to something  - or someone - else. But you are the only person who can do it, and you better believe it is worth it, the numbers don't lie.

So what are you waiting for?

There is more to it

The unique properties of different types of continuous improvement and the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve are only two examples that further complicate a more elaborate model for calculating continuous improvement. But more about that at a later time. Considering these extra parameters does not dismiss the simple - and compelling - premise that investing 15 minutes of time every day to gain back 30 seconds makes a lot of sense.

PS: If you want to calculate what this means in your case, check out our landing page.