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:
- Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
- Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
To find the right things, we'll need to go to the garden.
6 comments:
u made it very big i guess...
eppo la irundhu philosophy?
There is a good story about being effective and efficient:
One night several years ago, in a small town in Arizona, a newly appointed got a telephone call informing him that there was a dead horse in the middle of the road which is to be removed. The sheriff asked the name of the street, to that, the caller replied Tanzanite Street. How do you spell that, asked the sheriff? "I don't know, but I'll find out", came the reply. Ten minutes later, the caller again called the sheriff and said " Sheriff, I could not get the correct spelling of Tanzanite street, so I have moved that dead horse over to the Easy Street, that is spelled E-A-S-Y".
Here, the caller is efficient but ineffective.
Efficiency means turning the crank right. Effectiveness is turning the right crank. In other words, you may be turning the cranks faster than anyone else in the industry, but you need to turn the right cranks to be effective.
Einstein ( I presume), was said to have charged a car owner, when the car was struck in the middle of a road due to a starting trouble, $10for just turning one bolt in no time and making the car start again. When the owner refused to pay $10 for turning just 1 bolt and was adamant to pay only $1, Einstein replied calmly, the charge is still $1 only for the turning the bolt, but balance $9 is for turning the right bolt.
That is how effectiveness become more important than efficiency.
Finally, to phrase in the same lines of Stephen Covey's famous book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", one of your habits could be "Seek first to be Effective and then to be Efficient".
Nanba, iam happy to see this da!!! it was wonderful reading. Karutthulla Krishnan rocks!!!!!!!!!!!
HI krits . How come u suddenly became so philosophical.
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