Try a cost-benefit analysis for personal productivity

If you have trouble deciding weather an undertaking should be completed or not, a task should be defered or not, if you should be finishing your work now or tomorrow, you may be able to use a technique widely implemented in economics and company finances called cost-benefit analysis. I don’t want to get into technical details, but basically you are calculating if a project is worth doing, you are asking yourself if the benefit is worth the cost. Even if you can’t put numbers to your cost benefit analysis, taking some time to think about stuff may put you on the right track.

Basic cost-benefit analysis

If you need to make a quick decision, take 5 minutes, sit down and at least make an effort to make it a good and educated one. A crude, but effective way of creating yourself a quick cost benefit analysis is the positive vs negative list. List the positive aspects of your potential decision, but on the other side of the ledger, put down all the negative things as well. This is most productive if you try your best to create roughly equal pairs. Go from biggest benefit and largest cost downward on the scale. This may show you tht the costs grossly outweight the benefits or vice versa.

That’s basically the idea behind any personal cost benefit analysis. You can assign weights to specific items, the entry “I might make $1.000.000″ probably outweighs “I will need to make 100 photocopies”, unless you’re very, very lazy.

Advanced techniques, criteria

Life is of course not black and white, so in many cases you will want to make a decision even if costs outweight the benefits. Using the weighing method you can assign numbers to each entry. You can then add everything up, where 0 means costs equal benefits, negative numbers mean larger costs and positive numbers mean higher benefits. You can designate borders for accepting a decision even if it is costly, for example you can deem -5 to be the highest cost you will accept.

Productivity with cost benefit analysis

If you want to take this method seriously you can take it to the next step by creating steps to take, standardizing your method. If you have to make some similar decisions frequently you can draw up a table in Excel containing the frequent costs and benefits of these situations. You can then easily fill out this table and add some entries on the fly too, creating a quick CB analysis for yourself each time.

This will help you make the best out of each situation, and the whole thing really doesn’t take more than a few minutes in most cases. Do you have some similar methods you use? Please let us know in the comments!

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