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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Sometimes a great feature hides in plain site from me. A great example is the trends link in Google Reader, which I have never checked out for some reason, but now that I did, I want to show you guys what it can do. Basically it’s a statistics factory for your RSS reading habits, which may seem useless or only fun to many people, it does give room for some productivity.

I actually only have about 20 feeds at a time, I tend to root out ones I don’t read often. Now that I looked at the trends, I discovered that there are feeds where I only read about 2% of the material published. Google reader shows you this info in a “top feeds” table where you can see the number of items published in a feed per day, and the percentage of items you actually read. This works really well, since if you have 200 items unread in a feed and simply click “mark all as unread” these won’t count in statistics-wise. o if you’re struggling with hundreds of feeds, why not slim them down a bit? If you read them for entertainment or for work, I think you can safely delete ones where you read only 1-5%.

Another great feature is on the left, where you can see starred, shared and emailed items, grouped by feed, so you can derive the most important feeds in your life, or ones with the most quality posts. For bloggers this could be especially useful, since I do cover stories from others once in a while, and seeing the most quality blogs is a real help.