Three strategies for getting from efficient to effective
No matter where you are on your work-life journey – just starting out or retired from formal work, effectiveness matters. For instance, we’ve all had the experience of being engaged in activity that seems a bit pointless, like being in meetings that are inefficient or don’t feel necessary. Perhaps they were not well run: an unfocussed discussion or some participants doing all the talking. These important efficiency matters can be improved relatively easily.
But effectiveness is a much bigger issue. It raises broader questions about how the meeting – or any activity – connects with the bigger picture of where you are headed and why. Is the meeting’s purpose clear? Is the meeting addressing the right concerns? Are we engaging with the question at the right level? How are we progressing our real purpose?
Efficiency is about getting stuff done more quickly.
Effectiveness is about getting the right stuff done.
These ideas overlap, but they are definitely not the same. Real progress depends on understanding which is the more fundamental driver.
Why efficiency isn’t enough
Often, we’re so preoccupied with being more efficient – how to get up the ladder more quickly – that we pay scant attention to harder questions like, Is the ladder against the right wall? Or, even, What wall?
The drive for efficiency can become one of the things that distracts from a needed focus on effectiveness and the quest for real progress that underpins the best work. An efficiency dominated mindset can give a false sense of achievement even as it sucks the energy out of the deeper enquiry about where you are headed.
The fact is that many important productivity drivers – purpose, fulfilment and engagement – depend on getting this ladder/wall question right.
Getting into the effectiveness zone
If effectiveness is so central to fulfilment and success, why is it often sidelined in comparison to the vast amounts of effort and research that go into improving efficiency?
Questions about effectiveness tend to open up strategic issues about purpose, outcomes and even the ultimate worthwhileness of an activity. This questioning can be challenging.
Three key strategies
Here are three strategies to help you get into an effectiveness mindest.
- Deliberately interrupt activity patterns
- Change your physical context
- Ask effectiveness questions
Strategy 1: Deliberately interrupt established patterns
Making space to find a different perspective generally requires some kind of interruption. For the kind of change that leads to greater effectiveness, increased satisfaction and more meaningful work, we need to interrupt ourselves intentionally and for long enough to ask effectiveness questions.
One consultancy we’ve worked with extensively encourages intentional interruption through regular off-site café meetings. These meetings are designed to interrupt the tyranny of weekly to-do lists, help staff stand back from their routines and open up questions about effectiveness in relation to the company’s projects and strategies. The meetings also keep alive discussion about how work impacts the staff’s other life projects.
Make your interruptions matter
Being clear about your intention increases your chance of success. So have a plan. Decide for yourself or discuss with your team what your intention is:
- Refresh your strategic objectives for a product or service?
- Is what you are doing delivering the results you really want?
- Review whether metrics for results are meaningfully related to your purpose – your bigger picture?
- Generate effectiveness questions in relation to habit-driven processes; e.g. “Is the daily stand-up meeting actually effective for everyone, or is there a better structure?”
Strategy 2: Change your context – get outdoors
The good news is that there are many ways to interrupt weekly structures to reflect on effectiveness. One powerful strategy is to spend more time out in nature. For years, research has been accumulating on the many benefits of spending time outdoors (e.g. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/04/nurtured-nature). The boom in hybrid working triggered by the pandemic has opened new opportunities to craft more flexible working arrangements – provided you get the right structures in place.
A past client who is a senior manager in a professional services consultancy recently gave us an excellent example of using planned interruption to improve an effectiveness issue. He’d been in the habit of trying to improve his productivity by careful weekly planning. But while Mondays and Tuesdays would go according to plan, by mid-week, the plan tended to fall apart under unpredictable competing influences.
So he intentionally interrupted this pattern. He decided to take Wednesdays off, not just to work from home, but to get out into nature. Running, swimming, biking, he gets away from the familiar workplace and routines that impeded his time to reflect.
With this split week, he is more effective and productive. And that mid-week Wednesday no longer has the power to disrupt his plans! (Example used with permission.)
Less dramatic and more doable are interruptions like taking a walking lunch break outside the office. The difference between this being an effectiveness interruption and not just a refreshment break lies in the questions you set out to consider during your walk.
Strategy 3: Ask yourself challenging second-order questions
Effectiveness questions are second-order questions that move thinking to a higher level. They tend to focus on the strategic level and on bigger-picture purposes.
There are endless possible questions, and they are very context dependent. But here are some thought starters:
- What is the purpose of this work/project/business? Why are we doing this?
- What does progress really look like here? How will I know if I am making progress?
- How could I structure my day differently to produce more meaningful outcomes? Daily? Weekly?
- What other activities could we be doing that would amplify what is working?
- How much do I really care about this? (If the answer is, “not much”, then you should ask the subsequent question, “What am I doing about changing that?”)
At a larger scale of effectiveness: how sustainable is your career and work-life itself? “Sustainable” here means that your daily work is purposeful on your terms.
The key to effectiveness interruptions
Making effectiveness interruptions really work depends on developing a habit of changing your context and asking effectiveness questions. You don’t need to wait for the quarterly strategic review or your next official holiday. Now can be a good time to start.
Need some help …
These questions can be complex and difficult to work through. If you could use guidance from an independent perspective – this is what we do. Feel free to contact us. We are very happy to discuss options.
Thanks for reading. If you’ve found this helpful, please forward to colleagues, friends or family who may also find it useful.
Cheers to being more effective!
Max and Frances
NOTE Nothing in this article is AI generated