Efficiency vs Effectiveness
➡️➡️New this October: The Meaningful Productivity Workshop Series. Join me for live, free, practical workshops on the secrets to Meaningful Productivity. Reserve your free place here. ⬅️⬅️
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It’s good to be efficient.
Sometimes, I catch myself noticing things that people do that mean that a task takes them far more time than is necessary. And I think… well, it would be good for them to not do that.
I’ve always been interested in economy of effort.
Maybe I just picked that up from my dad, whose attitude to washing up knives is: if they look clean, and have been soaked, why wipe them?
I’ve always been caught by the ideas that people share that enable us to operate with greater efficiency.
One of my early line managers talked about a ‘critical path analysis’, which, as I understand it many years later, is about analysing a process to minimise the amount of time spent waiting.
In the morning, if I’m preparing breakfast, I might look selfish.
I get mine mostly ready first. But that’s because while my omelette is cooking, I can be getting my daughters’ cereal ready. The critical path to efficiency is to be able to be working on their breakfast in a period where I am otherwise waiting for mine.
The reverse would look more polite, but would involve all of us (if they’re being really well behaved) waiting while the omelette cooks, when their breakfast was ready minutes ago.
Efficiencies like this matter. They can add up.
I remember hearing about the idea of putting a little sticky dot on a piece of paper (you’d need an electronic one these days) each time you pick it up, to show that you’re wasting time thinking about a thing over and over without dealing with it.
But no matter how satisfying efficiencies are, they tell us almost nothing about our effectiveness.
As I’m fond of saying in workshops I run, you can get really efficient at replying to emails, but it doesn’t make you a good leader.
This happens every day.
I’ve seen people with incredibly elaborate and probably smart filing systems for their email. But a more effective way to deal with email is probably just to stick it in one big archive folder - the search engines on our email clients can almost always find the thing we need.
Efficient filing is a marvel, but it’s not as effective as not filing at all, and using a different tool to achieve the same results.
More than that, we can get incredibly efficient in a job, dealing with tasks swiftly and directly. We can process an incredible amount of tasks in a day.
But if they aren’t the tasks that really matter, we won’t remember that at the end of our careers, or at the end of our lives.
I am fast at doing things.
I’m a fast typer, a fast thinker.
I’m efficient - and I love efficiency.
But the reason I look productive has almost nothing to do with that.
A coaching business, four books, two podcasts, 9 years of this blog, many other articles, and all (for the last 5 years) while only working four (sometimes short) days a week.
Even I have to admit that’s productive.
But it isn’t about efficiency.
It’s about the courageous choices I make. The bold prioritisation. The management of my attention and focus. The way I protect my energy. The habits I create.
These are the things that really move the needle.
Show me someone who is genuinely productive, and I’ll show you someone who makes bold choices, manages their attention and more.
They may be efficient, but that is a secondary cause, a nice to have.
This distinction really matters.
It matters on a big scale, across our careers.
And it matters across our whole life: there’s no point getting efficient at the job we’re doing, if what really matters to us is something completely different.
These topics are so meaningful to me. That’s why I’m running a series of free, live workshops this October about my Meaningful Productivity framework (more at the bottom of this article).
But the most important thing to remember is this: no one is good at time management because you can’t manage time.
And you can be as efficient as you like, but it tells us almost nothing about how genuinely effective you are in the world.
The world is too complex to just get faster at doing what you’re doing.
What got us here won’t get us there.
When the world keeps asking more and more of us, we don’t have to give it the answer we think it wants.
We can slow down, step up onto the balcony and look down at our work and our wider lives.
We can make different decisions, open up choices and get more of what really matters done.
Those are the moves that I care about for my clients.
The moves that stop firefighting and shift us into something more.
The moves that halt the slide to overwhelm and put more life into our lives.
And if you care about them for you, why not join me in the Meaningful Productivity Workshop series this October?
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PS I’d love you to join me for the Meaningful Productivity Workshop Series - free, live sessions throughout October.
In these 60-minute workshops you’ll:
Rethink productivity so you can do more of what really matters.
Learn practical tools to reclaim your focus, reset your energy, and make change that sticks.
Explore the Six Pillars of Meaningful Productivity and start applying them right away.
The series culminates in an intimate VIP Deep Dive where we’ll uncover what truly matters to you and how to carry it into every part of your work and life.
👉 Reserve your free place here: https://www.robbieswale.com/meaningful-productivity-workshop-series
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.