Efficiency Vs. Effectiveness

Recently I attended a training program on time management. Overall the program wasn’t great, but it provided me a couple of useful distinctions:

• Urgent tasks vs. Important tasks
• Efficiency vs. Effectiveness

The Harvard Business Publishing website has a good, short article on how to deal with the dilemma of urgent and important tasks.

The Efficiency vs. Effectiveness distinction was first made by Peter Drucker:

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. For manual work, efficiency was enough. In today’s world, the center of gravity has shifted from the manual worker to the “knowledge worker”. For knowledge work, effectiveness is more important than efficiency.

- Peter Drucker

Effectiveness is basically the ability to pick out and execute the tasks that are important.

The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.

- William James

Sound of Music

Browsing through the blogosphere randomly I stumbled upon a picture that reminded me of a similar picture of mine. The dateline of the blog post reveals that the two pictures are one year apart.

These pictures are taken in the Austrian city of Salzburg where the legendary Hollywood movie 'Sound of Music' was filmed. A guided tour of the various shooting locales is an essential item in the itineraries of all tourists from English-speaking countries (the movie is not known in the non-English world). The bus in the pictures is of a popular 'Sound of Music' tour operator in Salzburg.

I must tell you about our guide for this tour - Trudy. She is the most amazing guide I have come across. Her voice quality, bredth of knowledge, sense of humour and exuberance are exceptional. The Net has so many blogs heaping praise on her. Here is a picture of hers. The structure in the background may remind you of 'Sound of Music'.