metrics

Metrics (what a researcher client of mine calls indicators) for quantifying personal productivity improvements is a topic I started tracking when I got into the field. Having some kind of measure is important if you want to determine whether your presumably improved changes have actually helped. As I quoted in What's Your Feed Reading Speed? (attributed to Peter Drucker [1]):

If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. -- Peter Drucker? [1], [2]

As a follow-up to Afraid to click? How to efficiently process your RSS feeds I decided to time a few of my RSS processing and organizing [3] sessions. I've included the results below, with average time spent/post in bold. (Note: See the above article for the simplified workflow I use.)

Here are the results:

Test 1

#    : 139 posts
avg  : 33 minutes / 139 posts -> 14 seconds/post

Test 2

#    : 81 posts
avg  : 26 minutes / 81 posts -> 19 seconds/post

Test 3

#    : 242 posts
avg  : 43 minutes / 242 posts -> 11 seconds/post