How to be more efficient?
Efficiency is my favorite topic. In everything I do—from making coffee to managing a team—I strive to increase the efficiency of the task. It’s not as tiresome as one might think. In layman’s terms, it means taking feedback on your actions and improving upon them. The act of iterative improvements is how you achieve efficiency. The goal of achieving higher efficiency is to utilize your resources, such as time or manpower, to deliver higher output.
There’s a limit to how much you can increase your efficiency because soon all your avenues for increasing your output will be exhausted. At that point, only technology can help you deliver more. That’s how humanity has made tremendous progress. But why is it so important to be efficient in life?
We have limited time and limited resources. To achieve more, you need to be able to do many things at once. You have to honor many commitments in life. Multitasking is a joke; it cannot be the answer because you cannot do many things simultaneously if you struggle to focus. The quality will drop, which will cause grief later. So, the best way forward is to be efficient in whatever you do. How can one become more efficient?
Efficiency can be measured by how much energy you need to expend to complete a given task. In simple terms, what is your effort-to-completion ratio? What is the time required to finish a task at the highest quality? What can you do to reduce the time—which is your energy here—while still delivering the same quality? That is your efficiency. If something goes wrong in terms of quality, gather feedback and focus on ensuring the quality never drops.
You should move on to another task only when you have managed to maintain consistent quality throughout. A lot depends on how good you are at taking feedback because if you do not acknowledge the need to improve quality, then you can never be efficient in life. You’ll always be a mediocre person because superior quality is never your aim, so whatever you do in life will always have the taint of mediocrity.
Everything you do in life requires a certain degree of quality to be considered “done.” Measure the effort and time required to accomplish that. Then focus on how you can achieve the same quality with even less effort. Gamify the work. Keep doing that, and you will reach a point where you are operating at the highest efficiency. Then you can move on to another task.
This constant need to increase your efficiency will determine where you need to bring in technology. AI can do a lot of tasks, but you need to dictate what you seek from AI.
Incorporating feedback to improve the quality of work while reducing effort is how you achieve efficiency.