Incremental Improvement and the Power of No More Zero Days

How small changes lead to big results.

You can’t immediately leap to the top. You can, however, get there one step at a time. Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash

Doubling your productivity may seem impossible. If your productivity is 100 today, it won’t be 200 tomorrow. But what about increasing your productivity by just 1 percent? What about going from 100 to 101? That seems doable. So why not do that a hundred times?

Incremental Improvement

Big changes rarely happen instantly. There are very few things that can actually cause your output to significantly increase. There is, however, a plethora of things that can increase your output by an amount that may seem insignificant at first. There are many, many things that can increase your output by one or two percent, and your time is better spent searching for those. Because in the time it might take you to find one thing that increases your productivity by twenty percent, you might find ten things that increase your productivity by three percent.

Discovering something that doubles your efficiency is a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime event — otherwise, older people would be orders of magnitude more efficient than younger people — while these small, incremental improvements come up every day.

This is augmented by the notion that productivity, in my experience, has momentum. Imagine…