[...] Cal Newport over there has created a metric for measuring his project completion, which he calls a churn rate.  I’ve adopted this myself and I think it works really well.  It makes you stop chipping, and [...]

[...] churn rate helps to determine where you fall on the spectrum from effective to busy. Being productive is one [...]

[...] 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 [...]

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.

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).

[...] Are you effective or just busy? Calculate your churn rate to find out. [...]

[...] Are You Effective Or Just Busy? Calculate Your Churn Rate to Find Out [...]

[...] 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 [...]