>If you produce exactly the same as you did last month but nobody is buying it this month (or ever again) it means your productivity is zero. Is that true? Or does it mean your productivity is negative?
No, your productivity has no connection to sales unless your job is in sales. And productivity for individual employees is measured all the time, across all industries.
Your time and output is being paid for by your employer, not the customer (except where they are the same person,) therefore productivity is loosely a measure of the value you create for your employer over time.
Proxies of productivity are measured. what really matters is total net profit over tha life of the work. For sales this is easy to measure, and for production factoriy workers it isn't too hard. But for most jobs it is hard. Even simple acts like greasing machines is hard to measure how it affcts profits (an actountant can do it, but at the cost of an actountant is it worth measuring) for engingineering the measure cannot be made until the last of that product is sold, but we need it up front to decide if we should invest in the engineering.
in that sense everything is a proxy and the word ceases to have any meaning.
This is a class "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". You're talking about productivity as a whole, everyone else is talking about productivity of the individual parts. The two are related but independent.
Why so complicated?
Productivity per se has nothing to do with sales or employment at all. I can be very productive writing poems for myself.
High Productivity = Spent effort results in progress towards the desired outcome (the product).
The question is: What is the product?
I believe the issue is, that many (software) company are confused about that. Their product is the invoice. Everything else – especially the software sold, is just a means to an end.
You can be very productive writing poems but how do you measure your productivity? Number of lines you write per day?
Similarly in software development it is commonly understood that the lines-of-code is a bad metric for productivity. Some people write many lines while others may eliminate lines from it.
In general "productivity" is about economic activity and thus measured in monetary terms. But that doesn't make it any simpler.
No, your productivity has no connection to sales unless your job is in sales. And productivity for individual employees is measured all the time, across all industries.
Your time and output is being paid for by your employer, not the customer (except where they are the same person,) therefore productivity is loosely a measure of the value you create for your employer over time.