You’ve probably heard the quote by Albert Einstein that “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” and you can’t ignore the figures over the long term when it comes to saving your money. But compound increases apply to anything. Including productivity.
I never really though about this before, but I was listening to a Brian Tracy audio book this morning, and it’s mentioned there, and when it was it stuck me as such a simple approach to improvement: If you improve your productivity by just 2% each week, in three months your total productivity will have increased by nearly 27%. And in about eight months, you will have doubled your total productivity. By year end, you’ll be operating at 280% of your current productivity. That’s with just a 2% increase per week.
To put that into a picture, lets say you get 10 “Man Hours” work output done per week, and increase your effectiveness by 2% each week:
| Time | Increase In Output | Man Hours/Units of Output |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Month | 108.24% | 10.82 |
| 3 Months | 126.82% | 11.04 |
| 6 Months | 160.84% | 16.08 |
| 9 Months | 203.99% | 20.40 |
| 1 Year | 280.03% | 28 |
| 2 Years | 784.18% | 78.42 |
Can you increase your productivity, do something more effectively, or change some part of your current routine which will allow you to become 2% more efficient in some part of you life over the next week?
The answer is almost certainly “Yes”. If it isn’t then you have two choices, give up now, or become more creative in the way you address your situation. And as time goes on, you will have to become more creative then just dusting of your copy of Getting Things Done and start addressing some bigger issues in your life, like organising your shopping list by aisle or switching all your socks to identical pairs.
The nature of compounding always leads to disbelief if you look just at the end result. Tony Robbins uses a great example:
When playing golf if you offer to play for a small 1 penny bet per hole, that’s nothing.
So you then offer to make it a bit more fun, by doubling the bet at each hole. So hole 2, you play for 2 pennies - again, nothing -, hole 3 it’s 4 pennies - still nothing - and so on.
Long story short, on the final(18th) hole you would be playing for £1310.72. Most people would agree, that’s far from nothing.
It’s very difficult to grasp how those pennies become such a huge amount over a short space, on hole 14 it’s still under the three figure mark at only £81.92, but compounding is a magic thing that works best over long periods, as soon as it “kicks in” there is a snowball effect.
So there you have it, you can step up to the challenge and spend a moment each week to look for that small improvement and allow your own personal output to snowball with nothing to lose. Or you can scoff at the idea and do nothing.
I know what I’m going to try.
