Everybody seems to be saying that Britain needs to improve its productivity. I can’t do much to sort out the countries problems but I thought it would be more constructive that the average newspaper correspondent and come up with some actions other than the uselessly vague invest more.

In my economics textbook (50p) the say you can improve productivity in a few ways.
– Produce more in less time
– Produce things more cheaply

Methods of achieving this
– Invest in things that will make you faster or more highly skilled
– Outsource tasks to someone else who does it better
– Personal productivity
– Innovation

I can’t see what machinery I could buy that would enhance productivity. I can see that education/training might be effective but I’m not sure what.
The vast majority of my time is spent working on customer work, I have about half a day a month of invoicing and archiving. Not sure using an accountant or having an admin person would help majorly.

Repeatability might work if I could build things that multiple people might use like a WordPress plugin that could be used by many different people after the effort of writing the nth sale is pure profit so increases productivity.
Generally my work is specific to a customers business or need so not generally applicable. Most of what I do is about improving other peoples businesses productivity, occasionally their ideas or the improvements don’t work but generally I produce things that make their jobs easier or enable them to do more or get them to the place they need to be.

Thats not increasing the number of jobs directly but I hope if I can make their businesses more efficient they can grow and employ more people or pay their now more productive staff more.

There is personal productivity don’t spend (much) time gazing out of the window and such soft stuff but I think I’m probably ok at that. Not sure its productive reading another 5 ways to improve your productivity article.
Perhaps invoicing for all of time spent and not missing out the time I’m spending in front of a computer working but not charging for it.

Probably in the long term moving away from X per hour to Y per outcome where Y has higher value would enable scaling away from time as a limiting factor but talking about is boring. Who wants to be a consultant.

Anyway still here and thinking whilst typing.