Being Effective Vs Being Efficient

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 with-out regard to effectiveness is default mode of the universe.

I would consider the best door-to-door salesperson effecient - 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-mil or direct mail.

This is also true for the person who checks email 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 effecient 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 right things.
To find the right things, we'll need to go to the garden.