I recently broke my dominant hand playing hockey. On the one hand (pun intended), I was lucky enough that the accident happened during the last game of the season so I did not miss any games. On the other hand, the end of the season coincided with the end of the semester. This meant that I needed to type and write more than usual in the month to come. Discouraged, I could not imagine how I was going to get everything done on time with a broken hand that essentially halved my writing speed.
Sure enough, I managed to get everything done without much more work and stress compared to previous semesters. This experience made me remember a podcast where Tim Ferris and Ramit Sethi “disagreed’ on the importance of tools. It was almost satirical that I would spend hours trying the find the best new productivity tool to make the writing and editing process slightly more efficient when I could get the job done with a broken hand. Stephen Hawking wrote many books and papers with a highly inefficient process.
This draws on the difference between being effective versus being efficient. I could never remember what the difference between the two was until one of my colleagues made the concept “sticky” with a story.
Being effective is killing a fly with a bazooka.
Annonymous Wise Person
I like this story because it is short and explains the meaning of efficiency implicitly. Taking an extremely efficient approach to killing the fly would be to use the least amount of resources possible. In being efficient, we often run the risk of not being effective (missing the fly) and having the spend more time and energy than if we took the effective approach from the start.
Most of us procrastinate by chasing efficiency. Don’t wait for a broken hand to teach you this lesson. What tools are you using that get in the way of doing the work?