During bad economic times, we are implored to try ‘doing more with less’ as a popular cliche puts it. Not surprisingly, we often use the words efficiency and effectiveness synonymously, although there is a big difference between them.
Industrial processes and efforts to maximize production by getting the most out of men and machines have contributed to making us confuse these similar words whose meaning is quite different. Efficiency has to do with doing things right in a timely fashion and with least possible cost whilst effectiveness has to do with doing the important things right in order to achieve pre-set goals.
To put it another way, efficiency is doing things right, whereas effectiveness is doing the right things. Efficiency has to do with the process of production, while effectiveness deals with the result or outcome in relation to the desired goal.
The American time management expert, Peter Drucker, first drew attention to this difference when he realized that working efficiently in industry did not always produce the desired results. Workers can be very efficient doing the work they are assigned even where the work itself does not contribute significantly to the company’s bottom line. For example a School Principal can be efficient managing his school’s finances, but fail to motivate his teachers to get the best out of the students. We can be very efficient doing the wrong things. In almost all instances, being effective is more important than being efficient. You can be efficient without being effective but it is almost impossible to be effective without being efficient.
I learnt this difference the hard way. Years ago as a medical registrar I tried to keep abreast of doing discharge summaries of recent ward in-patients and clinic letters to patients’ general practitioners (GPs) by sometimes working on them at weekends, or even taking the notes home (this was in the era before all the ho-la-la of patient confidentiality). I had inherited a mountain of unfinished work from my predecessor and had determined not only to clear the arrears but to make sure I was always on top of my own work so as not to repeat his mistake. This was before the era of computers; so I would make time during my time off to go back to the office or lug the files home, and then dictate clinic letters or summaries to a Dictaphone machine from which the secretary would later listen to, and type the letters.
This continued for some time until one day my consultant took me with him on a Domiciliary Visit to one patient’s home. The visit was at the request of her GP who met us at the entrance of the patient’s home, carrying the patient’s record with him in his doctor’s bag. I was curious when I saw him rustle something out of his bag. It was a little brown A5 sized folder from which he retrieved some papers and began to read aspects of the patient’s medical history. My eyes literally popped open. Later I found out that the brown folder was the same one used by nearly all GPs; it was too small to contain our hospital summaries and clinic letters which were all typed on A4 size paper!
I was not only creating work for myself and the secretary, but the work was useless, and non-beneficial to those we were seeking to help! They could not store them. I was being efficient but working in a wrong way.
In another job assignment as head of a unit, I was required to submit weekly summaries of our activities. This called for submission of statistics and variation with previous months and years of various functions like in-patients, attendances to the emergency room, clinic visits, and unusual events like cardiac arrest calls and resuscitations of unconscious victims. I did this religiously for some years.
My suspicions were aroused when the same supervisor to whom I submitted these time-consuming reports complete with graphs of analysis and variations often asked for the same figures when he had to do presentations. I wondered why he requested this information when the data were contained in all the reports I sent him regularly.
So, one week when my flustered secretary came to my office almost in tears, I listened to her story and then decided to conduct an experiment. She had confessed that she had made a mistake by sending the documents to the wrong (email) address and could not retrieve them.
She was surprised when I told her not to worry about it, and that we would wait and see what happened; we would wait to see if the report would be missed or asked for. It was not. So, I stopped compiling, writing and sending the reports. She was pleased, not only because now I had taken off a chunk of her weekly chore, but also because what she thought of as her blunder had become a blessing in disguise; it had led us to a good discovery.
So are you efficient or effective? It is said that if you want something done on time, you give it to a busy person. Why? Most people may answer that it is because busy (successful) people have learnt how to manage their time. But since we are all given the same amount of time – after all there are 24 hours in each day for everyone – this may be only partially true. A more accurate answer may be that successful people are those who have learnt how to identify and do the things that matter. In other words, they have learnt to do the important things that are needed to achieve their goals. Have you?
If you have not, you may be suffering the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ as described by Charles Hummel in his little booklet of the same name. In this scenario, one allows urgent things which may not be that important in the long run, to crowd out the really important (but non-urgent) things in one’s life or business. Examples of urgent things that may steal our time include reading e mails, answering and responding to the telephone, and responding to other people’s urgency in non-critical matters. Important things that may not feel urgent may include planning to be debt free, making time for family and friends, and spending time with our children. Other examples of both abound in our daily lives.
one simple way out of the tyranny is prioritizing our work, daily, weekly or monthly. One could create lists of both the urgent and the important, and slot items that come upon us into one of the lists. Of course one has to be flexible as things change, and sometimes a matter can be both! In that case there is no conflict, and we just go.
Giving important things priority in our schedules makes us more effective in whatever it is we do.
