Read a very interesting article the other day on personal productivity. The tendency with human productivity is to work harder, longer, have todo lists etcetera. Fill time available and fill it with as many tasks as possible. Work harder, probably not smarter.

This article however came from a different angle and stated that you should work according to available energy (believe one can also use 'available capacity').

​This statement makes a lot of sense to me. I am sure also you have had these moments when you had a spurt in which you cleared work very quick while it didn't feel you needed to make a big effort. 

​Quite a few productivity gurus have stressed the fact to use your best energy on the critical few, the items that really mater and  deliver critical results, in stead of just creating business.

​This also requires learning to say 'No' in a polite way to tasks that only take your time yet don't advance you at all.

It does take courage though to take this approach in a world where being busy seems to be recognized more than results. 

That immediately sets the contradiction. In spite of only having to accomplish the critical few to achieve objectives, people remain extremely busy, as busy is what in many organizations gets  noticed and rewarded. 

So if you do choose to take the path of the critical few you must visibly demonstrate you now deliver more results than ever before!

​With the rapid development of technology, multitasking as mode of operation has spread like an oil spill and has become the norm. Computers enable this as they can have many different applications open at the same time.  Users jump from email to chat to an ERP transaction and so on. Increasing workloads stimulate multi-tasking in an effort to juggle through the work day.

More and more productivity experts advocate to have only a few critical tasks to do each day and to do them first thing, one at the time. Some go as far as even recommending to shut of any distraction like internet, email, phone, chat. The underlying idea is that focused work on one task without jumping around will increase productivity. All those that swear by this approach will tell you that their output in quantity and quality has increased a lot. I tend to agree to this - have applied this and found it very beneficial. Does require discipline though!

In the world of business, integrity is an important attribute. A definition of integrity: "The following of moral or ethical principles, and doing the same as what you say." There are more definitions out there yet most turn out to be pretty similar.

Business is about the bottomline. No two ways about that. So how to translate integrity in a simple and proper way into business principles. You probably guessed it, it is about creating a solid win-win between you and your business partners.

Many companies nowadays more than ever try to squeeze cost. There is nothing wrong with trying to operate low cost, in fact, capitalism puts that as a business requirement to begin with, to utilise resources economically. 

The old saying goes that time is money. But is that how businesses tend to act? The common ways for businesses to asses the money piece is of course in the P&L which comes monthly, quarterly and yearly. At an aggregated level money gets reported as a function of time.
 
How does business do this at a product level?  To this purpose, most apply cost accounting principles.
 
Does cost accounting have any pitfalls? To understand that, first we need to examine what cost accounting tries to accomplish. Normally, cost accounting allocates cost based on resources used to produce a unit, to come to a fair cost allocation that represents the cost of setup, labor and other. So far, so good.
 
A complicating factor comes in the batch-size produced. Bigger batches are perceived lower cost as the setup cost can be spread more thinly over a bigger number of units produced. Now product cost and target margins help to determine selling price. Many businesses need this as it is never easy to guess how much a customer is willing to pay. You need a starting price that you can defend when offering a product. I am assuming that a customer will always challenge a price and that the majority of business is no monopoly, to the contrary.
 
Once the base cost for each product is set, a next level use of cost accounting is to tune product cost to drive the most desired product mix. This of course will be the most profitable mix. Here we do run into a critical issue with cost accounting… cost calculated is two dimensional. It only links cost to volume (batch size) to drive variation.
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For a tool that drives critical decisions which products to promote, for which products to increase price and which products to discontinue, cost accounting lacks the critical element of time.