“Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.”
-Walter Chrysler

Efficiency is the key principal to success. No matter what the goal is, think of efficiency. Efficiency is the best possible outcome with the least possible energy/work used. When someone buys an air conditioner that uses 50% less electricity than the previous one and cools 50% more, that’s efficiency. When an employer fires a few employees and assigns their tasks to one individual for less pay, that’s efficient for the company.

Key Points

• Being effective and efficient means reducing chance of error and maximizing productivity with less effort
•  Your goal is more important than your method of getting there
• Calculate effectiveness and consequence
•  Do not calculate morals, only positive feedback for the specific situation in the long run
• Pareto’s 80/20 Principle, Parkinson Law and Occam’s Razor should be used
• Efficiency is less effort and more productivity, not less effort and less productivity
• Morals and personal values may clash with effectiveness. Nothing is set in stone

Efficiency is Simplicity

“Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.”
-Walter Chrysler

Be Simple

Your goal is to get the job done in the easiest and most effective way possible. It’s not about looking pretty in the process.

If you need to do math, using a calculator is the most efficient and effective way. Unfortunately in school we are taught not to use a calculator because it’s “cheating”. There are personal values involved here. It sounds very good on paper to learn long division just in case we don’t have a calculator handy.Unfortunately, practicing long division is inefficient because it’s easier to have a calculator on you than it is to get stuck in a situation like that in everyday life. Relativity comes into play.


If your goal is to be a math teacher, then maybe it’s effective in the long run to learn long division. It’s all about what you want to do. Simplicity is all about being direct and using the least amount of effort to get the best results in the situation you are trying to get results in.

Avoid Letting Personal Values get in the Way

Most people go to school and get a degree to increase their chances of getting higher paying employment. These same people will be looking for more money. Unfortunately, going to school for years, getting into debt from it and working full time for forty years isn’t effective or efficient. Working at a minimum wage job for the same amount of years, saving up and buying a newspaper stand is more effective. It takes less time, less money and produces more money in the long run. So that makes it more efficient as well.

Instead of people looking for effectiveness and efficiency, they go for the route that others won’t look down upon them for. A lawyer is highly respected, but a guy with a food cart in the corner is not so much. Yet, the cart guy makes twice as much money on average and spent almost no time or money on school.

Efficiency is Effectiveness

The end justifies the means. To avoid taking time to plan something tighter, some people just make a few notes and try to wing it. It takes less time in the beginning, but it leaves more room for mistake. If you run out of the house without a shopping list, you may have to take two trips to the supermarket instead of one. This will waste more time in the long run than it would have taken a little bit of time to write the list.

Efficiency goes hand in hand with effectiveness. Think about how to get there in the best way possible, don’t think about your favorite way of getting there!

 

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