Incresase Your Effectiveness

I read something recently that fascinated me.

It helped me understand the difference between being effective vs. being efficient. I thought you might find it as helpful as I did:

"Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible.

Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe. I would consider the best door-to-door salesperson efficient—that is, refined and excellent at selling door-to-door without wasting time—but utterly ineffective. He or she would sell more using a better vehicle such as e-mail or direct mail.

This is also true for the person who checks e-mail 30 times per day and develops an elaborate system of folder rules and sophisticated techniques for ensuring that each of those 30 brain farts moves as quickly as possible.

I was a specialist at such professional wheel-spinning. It is efficient on some perverse level, but far from effective.

Here are two truisms to keep in mind:

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.

2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

From this moment forward, remember this: What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things."

This tip was great for me because I'm guilty of taking pride in the efficient way that I do so many unimportant things! I hope maybe this helps you as much as it did me!