Favour effectiveness over efficiency

Building effectiveness into your life

Look at your own life and work. Are you fixated on being more efficient: on doing more and more of what you already do (though perhaps more easily, cheaply, and with less effort)? Or are you looking to make yourself more effective: to learn new skills, add new experiences, become more creative, and follow your ideas wherever they may take you?

Many people rush about being efficient while strangling their effectiveness. They follow the latest fads in time management and personal productivity, yet cannot spare a moment to discover if what they are getting done so much faster and more easily is worth doing at all.

Here’s the fundamental difference: efficiency tries to save time to do more of the same. Effectiveness uses time to avoid doing only what you have done before, in favor of working out how to do something better. And since time cannot be saved — you can’t store it somewhere to use later — only redirected, saving time to do more of the same is no saving at all. Only by choosing to use your time in new and different ways can you let go of the past to find what the future will offer you.