Another Look at Productivity and How to Influence It: Ability, Attitude, Tooling
Published on May 29, 2025, filed under management (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)
When we manage a business (or a team), our productivity is important. To maximize profits—that’s what business is defined to be for—, we desire high productivity.
By the classic definition, productivity is our output divided by our input. And in that model, the more output we get, or the less input we need, the higher our productivity.
Yet there are other views on productivity, some that may be beneficial to our work as managers. Here’s one I like, and its implications.
Dis- and Reassembling Productivity
Input consists of several factors, but as middle-managers, we may have influence on few of them. These can include budgets—but most frequently, it’s time.
Therefore, it’s instructive to replace input by time:
Productivity: Ć’(output/time)
This can then be disassembled further:
Output
The output may be influenced most by the following factors:
Output: ƒ((ability × attitude️ × tooling × form on the day) + support)
While the impact of ability (skills) and attitude (motivation) should be clear, that may not always be the case for tooling and form. Unavailable or poor tooling can tank our output (in the worst case, chopping wood with bare hands), and we also know how form influences output, too (compare work performance after a good night’s sleep to one after no sleep).
Support, here, is a bonus, one that doesn’t scale well: It’s the help by other people that can add to productivity.
Time
It wouldn’t be the first time that we lose sight of time in a work context, so time seems useful to consider, too:
Time: as defined by contract or defined by oneself, yet as limited by physiology
For a 40-hour work week, the output and therefore our productivity should be tied to this contractual constraint.
The idea of throwing more and more hours at work, whether that overtime is paid or not, is kind of cheating—contracts provide us with a limit.
The same should apply when we’re self-employed. We may be tempted to work more hours to increase productivity, but what we’re doing isn’t really increasing productivity—we’re merely hoping for more output due to the fact that we make use of more time.
Influencing Productivity
What dials does this model of productivity leave us with? I think the following:
Ability: We can increase ability through building experience and routines, as well as through training.
Attitude: We can coach and mentor to improve attitude.
Tooling: We can introduce and optimize tooling.
These three don’t seem to be suitable:
Form on the day: While it may be influenceable, and while patterns—regularly poor form—may require making an effort to influence it, the assumption here is that it’s only a sporadic temporary factor hard and usually not necessary to pay special attention to.
Support: Support by peers or third parties cannot be relied on and wouldn’t scale well; as such it’s not a factor to be looked at to improve productivity.
Time: Time should be governed by our contracts, and these contracts should be respected. If we don’t have a contract, we should set a limit for ourselves. Both serves to protect our free time and a healthy work/life balance, and locks in this factor.
❧ In summary, what I believe we see here is that time, in particular, is not the factor for us to influence productivity. Instead, it’s for us to invest heavily in abilities, in attitude, and in tooling.
Is this new? No, certainly not.
Is this perfect? No, definitely not. But when checking the list, on what drives productivity, then our and our people’s ability, our and their attitude, and tooling appear to be sound investments.
Is this naive, then? Could we not have thought about this? Maybe. Personally, disassembling productivity has been a useful exercise—one that makes me feel more comfortable about what levers there are, and which I like to focus on.
How about you?
Many thanks to Kevin Khaw for reviewing this post.
About Me
I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you’ve never heard of and companies you use every day, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.
I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)