I'll quote my day rate for a consulting gig, which will give the other party an immediate pulmonary embolism. But before it becomes terminal, I'll continue onto my spiel about how cost equals rate multiplied by time, and that neither term is meaningful on its own.
So you can hire a $50/hr guy to build this, but it'll take him six times as long because he's never built one o' these before. Or you can hire the $15/hr guy who will labor away tirelessly for six months before it becomes apparent that he is simply incapable of delivering a finished product. Or you can hire me and end up with your thing built quickly and correctly. (at which point, it's handy to point to a working example of something frighteningly similar that you've built recently to underscore the point).
For my own stuff, productivity is just as important. If I can get a new feature out the door in four hours on a Monday morning instead of 40 hours over the course of a week, then I've bought myself a lot of time to spend working on the next feature or (more likely) screwing off climbing rocks and playing with the kids.
It's the reason a little question mark appears over my head every time I see somebody mention how they don't mind writing code in a text editor and keeping a browser window open to look things up. Maybe if I was sitting in a cubicle, collecting a paycheck, that would fly. But if it's my time on the line, I'm going to leverage every last scran of tooling to speed things up.
That's a great way to put it, I've being asking this, because usually people put the focus on productivity method X or Y and this or that software to manage tasks. One can miss the point of why is productivity important for oneself in the first place. I found that for me focusing on answering this question, rather than on particular tools or methods, motivates me much more than just going mindlessly trough your workday fighting against productivity tools/methods.
So I'm not saying that tools of methods are not useful, just saying that the motivation can't come from using these tools or methods, but from the WHY. I guess sometimes people are so enthusiastic about particular methods or tools and there so much advice out there that it feels overwhelming.
So I though that coming back to the basic question could be helpful/healthy reminder.
I want to feel like I'm achieving things, and if I sit about all day doing nothing then that isn't going to happen. The only way to achieve things is to be productive.
Plus it feels great at the end of the day, to look back and see everything you've managed to do.
Productivity is about getting the right results for the least effort!