Efficiency and effectiveness |Blog Post by Rob Crews

We’re all told to focus on being efficient — performing a task with maximum productivity and minimum wasted effort or expense. We expect to achieve our goals when our work is efficient, but at times that doesn’t happen.

Introducing effectiveness

The reason may well be a lack of one simple ingredient — effectiveness.

In Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Work Week, he defines effectiveness as ‘doing the things that get you closer to your goals’. He observes that our default is to be efficient without considering whether we’re being effective. You can spend a day efficiently completing a complex task but if the task wasn’t worth doing, you weren’t being effective.

Making a change

The change from just being efficient to being both efficient and effective seems to come down to just one thing — asking yourself this simple question:

Does this task get me closer to achieving my goals?

Asking myself this question throughout my work day helps me in a couple of key ways — I feel like I have more time (because I’ve cut out tasks that weren’t effective) and I feel like I make better use of the time that I do have.

Also published on Medium.