Efficiency Vs Effectiveness

I’ve been thinking a lot more about efficiency and effectiveness recently and I’ve found some nugget of wisdom I would like to share with you.

Efficiency is doing things in a timely and productive manner and effectiveness is choosing and doing the right tasks. This means you can be efficient at doing wrong or right. In effect, standing alone, efficiency is meaningless! Performing a task so well and efficiently does not guarantee its effectiveness. For example, way back in the university, I was a movie addict (well, I’m still one, only that it doesn’t control me anymore) and I could spend hours out of my 24-hours watching an intriguing seasonal-movie while my lecture notes stared angrily and sometimes pitifully at me.

I can say I have efficiently utilised my time. But the question is, apart from the suspense, the fun and improving my grammar, how effective is spending hours behind a laptop watching a ‘common’ movie relative to reading my lecture notes, doing my assignments and improving my talents as a student? How well does this movie help me get closer to my goals as a student?

The fact that you might have performed a task inefficiently does not rule out its effectiveness – their overall effect might tend to be very effective. Reading one page of a book in a day is horribly inefficient if reading is your priority but it’s effective. Spending 30 minutes at the gym every week seems inefficient if building the body is your priority but it’s actually effective in the long term. If writing is your passion, writing 50 words a day is horribly inefficient and frustrating but it’s effective. If getting more customers is your priority as an entrepreneur, getting one new customer a day it’s a bit inefficient but it’s actually effective. Efficiency only modifies effectiveness but can never serve as a substitute for it.

Because most of us mistake effectiveness for efficiency, we do not make the best use of the most precious resource God has offered us – time. And mostly, as we retire to bed, we look back at how we spent our day and realise how wasteful it had been. Mostly, after watching my favourite movie, I become sad and angry at myself for ‘wasting’ my time. Why? Was the movie not fun to watch? – It was! Didn’t I enjoy watching it? – Of course I did, infact, every bit of it! Didn’t I achieve anything from watching it? Well, I thought I did. So why the sadden regret? Because I realised I could have as well used those same hours to achieve something more impactful. Regardless of how happy, busy and effecient I was while watching the movie, the sadden sense of unsatisfaction is simply a sign of my efficiency and not effectiveness. I get unsatisfied at the poor result because I was efficient at doing the wrong thing.

In order to find a balance between efficiency and effectiveness, we need to figure out and prioritise the tasks or activities that will have the greatest impact on our lives. Once we’ve determined what’s more ‘impactful,’ we can further determine the most effective thing we can do to move forward with our plans then regardless of our proficiency and efficiency we go ahead and do them anyway. On daily basis, we must do the most ‘impactful’ or effective activities first before engaging in any other (wrong) tasks; in this case, the feeling or regret of ‘wasting time’ doesn’t really matter because the essential things always get taken care of. This also will reduce significantly if not eliminate completely the sense of unsatisfaction we normally feel at the end of each day for not managing our times effectively because we can see significant evidence in our lives that reminds us of the fact that we are closer to our dreams today than we were yesterday.

Once you’ve now determined what’s impactful for your life and have figured out what is more effective (and have no doubt about it) and have demonstrated the ability to practise them, then perhaps, you can now consider ways to be efficient in those areas in order to increase your output. To me, it’s a great blunder to even consider efficiency unless you’ve first determine the most effective things you can do with your time and resources. If you take the whole day to do something boring and unimpressive but effective, that’s a resounding success and a remarkable victory!

Being effective is really difficult because it’s easier to be efficient than it is to be effective – whatever you can do, and do it efficiently is really fun. You can be very efficient at the same time, so ineffective. Always remember, it’s better to do the right thing poorly than to do the wrong things very well. Effectiveness makes up for a multitude of inefficiency sins, but no matter how impressive an efficient task is, it can never make up for choosing the wrong task. Effectiveness wins anytime! Master effectiveness, then maybe consider efficiency.

Author: Elorm Apediavu Hermann

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