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geoff R Says:
November 10th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Someone should make a yahoo or google widget that calculates your churn rate for you. you could click the “finished project”button when you finish a project, and the widget would count it for 30 days, before discarding it.
It would be nice to see it on your desktop or google homepage.
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Study Hacks Says:
November 10th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
That would be excellent…
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My Get Things Done List » Blog Archive » Saturday Links – Nov. 10 Edition [Gearfire Productivity] (Pingback) Says:
November 11th, 2007 at 5:04 am
[] see how productive you really are by calculating your churn rate. []
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Scott Young Says:
November 13th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Great article cal,
One problem with your formula. it doesn’t really distinguish with project size and importance.
If i have one extremely important project that takes six months of complete focus to finish, then my churn rate will be almost nothing but my effectiveness might be very high.
I would recommend factoring two more values for an enhanced (if unfortunately more complicated) formula:
-project size (used to compare a simple 4 hour project with 100+ hour projects)
-long-term impact. (estimated)
This might give you a better rating of your effectiveness than simply project turnover. I’m curious as to how you resolve the situation? or do you automatically chunk and label “project” anything that has equivalent value and time required?
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Study Hacks Says:
November 14th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Scott, great points. there might be a way to work in a simple version of project size. in the perfect world, you could break projects into roughly equivalent chunks. but let’s be honest, that’s not always going to be possible. maybe a “small,” “medium,” and “large” designation, worth 1, 2, and 3 points, respectively in the the numerator of the calculation?
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Scott H Young » Friday Links 07-11-15 (Pingback) Says:
November 17th, 2007 at 1:50 am
[] calculate your churn rate – cal newport has a great article here about calculating your churn rate. this measurement basically determines how quickly you cycle through projects. read the comments below for my comments for possible enhancements to the concept. []
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Organize IT Recap 17th Nov 2007Advice on organized and productive living through lifehacks and GTDOrganize IT (Pingback) Says:
November 17th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
[] churn rate helps to determine where you fall on the spectrum from effective to busy. being productive is one []
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Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Monday Master Class: How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer (Pingback) Says:
February 18th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
[] accomplishing more by doing less, using a productivity-free day, implementing a sunday ritual, and calculating your churn rate. if you like what you see, consider subscribing to the blog’s rss []
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Crazy for Queues: A Simple Hack for Complicated Schedules | HackCollege (Pingback) Says:
February 29th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
[] are you effective or just busy? calculate your churn rate to find out []
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Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Monday Master Class: Pulverize Large Assignments with the ESS Method (Pingback) Says:
March 24th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
[] are you effective or just busy? calculate your churn rate to find out. []
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Tyler Willis Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 1:10 am
Great post!
Scott and cal, i find it interesting that this system is similar to a feature of pivotal tracker (a project management software) that automatically calculates how effective each individual contributor is being.
They use a easy, medium and hard rating scale of 1, 2 or 3 points respectively and it works well — this could very well be a good answer to the problem of rewarding harder/larger projects.
Also has the benefit of helping you tackle the harder stuff first (feels more satisfying to earn 3 points instead of 1).
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Peter Scheyer Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 3:00 am
If you include a coolness measure, like ‘important, intriguing, cool! ’ for projects i think it might be a good indicator of how satisfied you are with what you’re doing.
Project size and churn rates for completion are good for preventing slacking, but interest in your work is just as important. having a high churn rate doesn’t mean you’re doing well;
You could have weeks and weeks of never working on your saturday morning project, and if you got everything you hate done you’d still have good churn.
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Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Plan. txt : The Most Effective Productivity Tool That You’ve Never Heard Of (Pingback) Says:
November 11th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
[] technique that i’ve been using since last january, and that has significantly increased my churn rate. this technique centers on a small, innocuous text file sitting on my computer desktop — a []
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Trish Says:
May 29th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Wow. this just opened my eyes. thanks for this great article! I’m definitely going to work on figuring out my churn rate now. this should help me get accepted into taking scholarship exams and acing them too. thanks!
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My Get Things Done List » Blog Archive » Organize IT Recap 17th Nov 2007 [Organize IT] (Pingback) Says:
August 9th, 2009 at 4:04 am
[] churn rate helps to determine where you fall on the spectrum from effective to busy. being productive is one []
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Chipping vs. Chopping « Imagination+Hustle (Pingback) Says:
March 4th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
[] cal newport over there has created a metric for measuring his project completion, which he calls a churn rate. ive adopted this myself and i think it works really well. it makes you stop chipping, and []
