Allan's dashboard

The Productivity Measure is not meaningful in its current form. Currently the Productivity Measure, as I understand it, expresses what percentile the user is in productivity compared with all RT users. However, this percentile is a function of the arbitrary productivity values that I assign to my tags. Furthermore, if my average productivity percentile is in the 90s the day-to-day variation is quite small and hard to observe.

Instead, I suggest making the producitvity a cardinal measure (or at least provide that option). For example, it could simply be the time of an activity times the productivity of that activity. This way, I can compare my productivity across units of time (days, weeks, months) in a meaningful way (eg. I could say if I was twice as productive one week versus another). In the current form there is little meaningful way to compare productivity levels, one can only rank order them.

Lastly, I would suggest making the productivity of an activity the sum of the tag productivities, and not the average. This will make it easy to both assign a given productivity level to a particular activity and to create a system of tags to visualize how one spends one's time. For example, if I want to create a super-set tag of all my "work" activities, it will change my productivity scores no matter what value I set the super-set productivity at. It would be better if one could tag activities without necessarily changing their productivity.

A similar cardinal measure for Efficiency would also be useful (eg. productivity/time on computer).

If you are concerned about disturbing the current system, them you could implement these suggestions as options for advanced users.

I look forward to your comments.