How to Measure Productivity

What matters most is often the hardest to track. We then measure things we don't care about with the hope that it will give some clarity. The solution:

• Pick a few metrics that will estimate what matters. The metrics should be easy to measure and timely enough to give good feedback. Rewarding only hours may mean paying for a lot of overtime and not much useful work.
• Use meta-feedback to tune your short-term metrics. Your big-picture output is harder and slower to measure, but it serves a role in regularly adjusting which of the short-term metrics will estimate progress. For example, if you track the number of essays written for your productivity, it may be good initially, but the quality may suffer in time. Following the articles' results can indicate if "hours per essay" should also become a metric.