Back in late February I blogged about becoming more productive and tracking how I spend my time during the work day. It has been a great help, and since becoming methodical about the process I have seen a great boost in my productivity.

In March I began scheduling my time in advance, which was stage two. Obviously, I failed to schedule any time in March to blog about stage two so I wasn’t as successful as I would have liked to have been, but it was a start.

Currently, I carve out blocks of time to write, and blocks of time for certain projects prior to their deadlines. Speaking of deadlines, that was another change I implemented in March with great results – every task now has not only a start date, but also an end date. As with the scheduling, I’m not where I want to be yet with it, but it’s a significant improvement over where I was in January.

Now it’s time for me to take the next step along this productivity path, and measure the value of how I spend an average hour of my work day. All along I’ve been assigning a value (from 1 to 10) to each task I work on in relation to how important the current task is in helping me to achieve my goals. For example, catching up on email is generally a 2 or a 3. Writing a section of my 109 Ways is a 9.

I’ll keep track of how I am doing on a weekly and monthly basis, and best of all, I’ll create a scoreboard for myself. I’ll be able to track any improvement over time. If I could go back and look at January, maybe it was an average of 6 productive hours a day at an hourly effectiveness rate of 4.5. I have no idea if that is accurate or not, but it wouldn’t be a bad guess.

In adding this process of tracking and measuring to my normal routine, I have followed my new philosophy for any new project – start simple and then slowly add on more layers of complexity. If I had started by trying to track each productive 15 minute chunk of time AND make appointments with myself AND measure the value of what I am working on AND keep a scoreboard of it, I think this process might have derailed in the first two weeks. Many people I know (my old self included) would try to launch a new project in the most complex and complete version possible and as a result it would never make it out of the starting gate.

For April then, I have now set aside the last 15 minutes of every work day to compile my score for the day and enter it into my scoreboard system. And if you’re wondering if it’s a coincidence that I have started my personal scoreboard at approximately the same time that baseball season is also cranking up…. I’d let you know, but I have to go. It’s my turn to step up to the plate.