How To Be Efficient

September 29th, 2009

An obstacle to goals that I hear regularly is that people don’t have enough time or resources. They imagine that drastic changes must happen immediately to free these resources. This usually tends not to be the case. You free time for yourself if you want to quit your job by creating a small part time business, sure in the short term you lose time but we’re looking at the long-term here. You gain resources by actively searching for them. They will not come to you without conscious effort.

Efficiency can be stripped down to two basic ideas:

• Minimising your time
• Maximising your output

Eliminate or pass it on

The first technique you should use before any of the others is eliminating unnecessary tasks. If they’re not realted to your goals, remove them. If they are but you shouldn’t be the one doing them, pass them on ASAP. Don’t become a human bucket for people to fill with tasks they could complete.

Pareto Principle

Regularly spoke about in the blogosphere, this theory created by an Italian Economist states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your tasks, so you should identify these tasks and eliminate the rest for time efficiency. This is a universal principle and really helps minimise time input and maximise output. 90/20 is a guestimate and it could easily be 90/10 or other similar ratios.

You can use this just to multiply efficiency rather than time. You do this by finding the 20% of tasks that give 80% of the outcome and then eliminating the lower 80% of tasks. Then you repeat the top 20% of tasks to fill the time you would have took doing the wasteful lower 80%.

Pareto can be used universally, areas may include:

• Dieting – Identify the foods that contribute most towards your health and goals, get rid of the rest and eat these more often.
• Socialising – If you visit several social clubs and go out with work colleagues each week then identify what you want from these social outings, cut of the lower 80% and maximise the results.
• Gym Workout – Identify which exercises are most time efficient and give you the results that you aim for, cutting the rest. A 40 minute jog may be a lot less efficient than a 30 minute slow workout using just your body weight.
• Budgeting – apart from the essential needs, which products that you buy or magazines that you subscribe to create value in your life?

Parkinsons Law

This law states that the task that you set expands to fill the time available for it. An obvious example is a school deadline for homework, you may have 5 days until you hand it in, but you’re still sweating ’til midnight the night before:-). That’s all fair and well but how do we get around this? Because we are aware of this, we can set ourselves self-inflicted mini-deadlines that we should tell ourselves are the actual deadlines even though they’re not.

This makes sure that everything is done on time and that you have no last minute cramming sessions about a deadline that you forgot. Again using the coursework example, you could even use this principle to set mini deadlines within mini deadlines, like write first draft by Tuesday, edit on Thursday, hand in final version on Friday.

Areas where you could apply this include:

• Homework assignments – Set deadlines in half the time the assignment is due for and make it a habit to get them in on time.
• Christmas/Birthday gifts – Even though they say Christmas gets earlier every year, it can creep up on you too, make it a deal to get all presents bought by say December 7th, avoiding the crowds and being efficient in the process.
• Emails – Got alot of emails to be sent out, give yourself an hour a day and see how efficient you become.

Ways you can maximise output

• Automation of processes – Including blog posting, maybe laundry, buy a dishwasher if you haven’t got one. My motto is “If a computer can do as good a job as me, then my time is better spent elsewhere”.
• Get up early – You literally get more hours to your life this way and set up a consistent sleeping pattern in accordance with nature and will have more energy.

Owning time

I dislike the phrase “I don’t have time”. I’m always tempted to respond with a knowing smile. Nobody can claim ownership of time, it’s the way you mould yourself around time that matters. You have to get as much done in as little time as possible, this is my personal definition for effectiveness. Everyone gets 24 hours/day.

Effectiveness before efficiency

Cultivating efficiency is all fine and dandy but don’t lose sight of the main goal, to find a purpose in life and follow it, this would be known as effective. Efficiency is always second place to Effectiveness. Concentrate more on creating value rather than just saving time. This is similar to saving pennies rather than creating pounds. This will also help you escape a belief in scarce resources.