Browse Definitions :
Definition

70 percent rule for productivity

The 70 percent rule, in a business context, is a time management principle suggesting that people should withhold a significant amount of their working capacity for better productivity, engagement and work-life balance. 

According to the 70 percent rule, employees are most productive not when they are working as hard as they can from day to day but when they work, most of the time, at a less intense pace. In this way, when demands are increased temporarily, they have some capacity to respond, whereas the employee working full-out is incapable of producing any more. 

Such situations can lead to stress and eventually to burnout, which in turn can lead to poor performance, absenteeism and sometimes quitting or job loss. For the employer, that means less productivity, increased costs and higher job turnover.

Best practices for incorporating the 70 percent rule include taking vacations and mini-breaks, leaving some of the day unscheduled and learning to refuse unreasonable work demands. 

In this TED talk, Stefan Sagmeister discusses the power of time off:

This was last updated in January 2015

Continue Reading About 70 percent rule for productivity

Networking
  • firewall as a service (FWaaS)

    Firewall as a service (FWaaS), also known as a cloud firewall, is a service that provides cloud-based network traffic analysis ...

  • private 5G

    Private 5G is a wireless network technology that delivers 5G cellular connectivity for private network use cases.

  • NFVi (network functions virtualization infrastructure)

    NFVi (network functions virtualization infrastructure) encompasses all of the networking hardware and software needed to support ...

Security
  • virus (computer virus)

    A computer virus is a type of malware that attaches itself to a program or file. A virus can replicate and spread across an ...

  • Certified Information Security Manager (CISM)

    Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) is an advanced certification that indicates that an individual possesses the ...

  • cryptography

    Cryptography is a method of protecting information and communications using codes, so that only those for whom the information is...

CIO
  • B2B (business to business)

    B2B (business-to-business) is a type of commerce involving the exchange of products, services or information between businesses, ...

  • return on investment (ROI)

    Return on investment (ROI) is a crucial financial metric investors and businesses use to evaluate an investment's efficiency or ...

  • big data as a service (BDaaS)

    Big data as a service (BDaS) is the delivery of data platforms and tools by a cloud provider to help organizations process, ...

HRSoftware
  • talent acquisition

    Talent acquisition is the strategic process an organization uses to identify, recruit and hire the people it needs to achieve its...

  • human capital management (HCM)

    Human capital management (HCM) is a comprehensive set of practices and tools used for recruiting, managing and developing ...

  • Betterworks

    Betterworks is performance management software that helps workforces and organizations to improve manager effectiveness and ...

Customer Experience
  • martech (marketing technology)

    Martech (marketing technology) refers to the integration of software tools, platforms, and applications designed to streamline ...

  • transactional marketing

    Transactional marketing is a business strategy that focuses on single, point-of-sale transactions.

  • customer profiling

    Customer profiling is the detailed and systematic process of constructing a clear portrait of a company's ideal customer by ...

Close