Efficiency vs Effectiveness: Why It Matters

I’ll keep this post short. You can be highly efficient at something (your job, a task, an effort, etc…), but that doesn’t necessarily mean that thing is effective.

If you’re great at selling a single pencil for 25 cents every day, and you do it every day in the most efficient manner, you still only sold a single pencil. You’re super efficient, but are you super effective? Rather than thinking only in terms of efficiency, think about how to maximize your effectiveness. Instead of a single pencil, strive to sell a pallet of pencils everyday. Be both efficient AND effective.

Tim Ferris says it best in his book The 4-Hour Work Week – “Doing something unimportant well does not make it important… What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.”

Find the “right things” – things that are effective, then do those things well.

Thanks for reading!