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Again, speaking only from my personal situation, my benchmark on how I am doing is to focus on my desired outcomes rather than the number of action items completed. I want to move projects forward, and looking at statistics of what I have checked off a list will not inform my thinking of how well I am meeting my goals, for the work that I do. Now if I do find myself being less productive than what I believe I should be, then time tracking for a day, or a week, can have value. Tracking time spent on tasks can be valuable, as it identifies a) the amount of time spent on the frivolous pages as well as b) opportunities for improving my workflow when dealing with the non-frivolous pages.

Now there certainly are work roles where tracking of completed tasks has value. As example, in sales there is a direct relationship between the number of customer contacts made and the number of sales generated. I worked in sales in a former life, and I had specific goals of the number of cold calls and follow-up contacts that I wanted to meet each day. The more contact I could make, the more likely I was to meet my sales goals. Others may have work responsibilities where quantity of tasks completed is still important, but less so than the nearly 1-1 relationship of a sales position.

What I would caution against is assigning too much importance to task completion as a productivity metric, even for a work roles like the sales position described above. The volume of calls I made was time wasted if my calls were not targeted to quality leads and/or if my calls were not planned with care. Years ago I would also fill the right-side daily pages of a Franklin-Covey planner with tasks that have little value, just so at the end of the day I could feel good about all the tasks checked off. I also know of people that enter completed tasks into a planner (paper or electronic) after the fact. That may have value if one needs to keep a historical record of a project's tasks, but otherwise it is just busywork.

Looking specifically at how all this works with OmniFocus, one can set up a perspective to provide what Things does (and more) with its logging completed tasks to the log book. Set up a perspective set to Contexts, with Grouping=Completed, Sorting=Completed, and Status Filter=Completed. This will give you a list of completed tasks organized by completed today, completed yesterday, completed in the last week, completed in the last month, last 3 months, etc. Click on the Context folder in the sidebar and it will list every completed task. Click on a specific context to limit the results to only one context, or command-click to get the results for a sub-set of your contexts.