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