Nowadays, the topic of making an impact on the world is very popular with a lot of people, and rightly so – we all want to leave a mark and not be forgotten! Let me tell you how I see impact: as your capacity for productivity.

The bigger your capacity for productivity, the bigger your impact! The more things you can do, the more people you’ll touch, the more lives you’ll enhance, the more value you’ll create, the less likely it’ll become for you to be forgotten.

So, here’s one insanely powerful technique to skyrocket your productivity and impact: it’s called benchmarking. Most people never think about this and that’s way they are incredibly inefficient. benchmarking isn’t a commonplace practice at all, which is 1) sad and 2) a great opportunity for you and me!

All you need to know about benchmarking

The need to have benchmarks for your tasks begins with developing a strong sense of urgency. Benchmarking starts with paying attention to the time each task takes you. We’re doing all sorts of things at work during the day and most people never stop for a second to consider how much time they pay out of their finite budget of time (your life) to do each task. This is a huge mistake. It doesn’t matter if it is your own business, your job, or a personal project of sorts – you have to pay attention to where your time goes, because this allows you to improve your process and work on reducing the amount of time you’re paying for each task. The structured process is called logging.

This works best with repeatable tasks. If you think you can’t predict much of your workload – you’re wrong. You can predict way more than you think. Begin by writing down your daily tasks, and then proceed to track how much time each one takes you in actuality. Now that you have this data, you can work on it!

Now, next time, instead of letting the same task take you whatever it happens to take you in terms of time, you’ll try to beat your previous time and do it a little bit faster. So it becomes like a competition with your past self. This is how you get better day after day. The lesson here is: you absolutely need to measure the resource you’re paying. You’ve heard the adage “What gets measured gets managed” by Peter Drucker – it’s 100% correct. The moment you start measuring your time cost for each task is the moment you can start working on reducing it.

Little by little, you’ll arrive at a place where you do certain things way faster than in the beginning. You’ll have a challenging but realistic, fast-paced time that you know is doable. The goal for your benchmark time is not to be achievable when you go about working casually, but when you’re absolutely on your A game.

Chasing the benchmark each time means you have to put pressure on yourself. Just like top athletes or business figures have coaches and mentors who are constantly demanding more and more out of them, you have to get into the habit of demanding more and more out of youself, even on days you ain’t feeling it. This is how you achieve satisfaction. Remember: faster doesn’t mean worse or cheaper. It means: do it at the same or better quality, but a lot more! This is how you expand your productivity and impact, and this is how you become more useful to yourself and to those around you.

If you want you and me to work on expanding your capacity for productivity and impact – don’t hesitate to book a FREE 15-min consulting call so we can talk about the challenges you’re facing and how I can help you, or you can go straight to the full-blown 60-minute performance coaching call where I can teach you all the powerful techniques that will make you an unstoppable, high-performance machine!