There’s a constant battle in the business world of efficiency versus effectiveness.
And while everyone in the industry wants to be more productive, it can be hard to figure out how to make that happen.
When you look ahead at the remainder of this year, is it more important to be effective, or is it better to be efficient?
Effectiveness Moves Your Business Forward
Effectiveness can be defined as the degree to which something is successful and produces a desired result.
When you think about being effective, it’s about making proper choices for your business. It’s about doing the things that will move the needle the most. What’s driving income in your business? What’s going to get you closest to the result as quickly as possible?
To be effective, avoiding useless work is the top priority—useless work shouldn’t be done in the first place.
The Problem with Efficiency
Efficiency is defined as achieving maximum productivity with minimal wasted effort or expense. Efficient people aim to finish tasks as soon as possible—sometimes before thinking of a long-term solution.
To them, the most important thing is to complete every task in a short period of time, whether or not it’s the most effective way to do it. Over time, this may cause them to work harder or longer to make up for a lack of effectiveness.
Think about someone who answers emails right away with a word or a fragment of a sentence in order to move on to the next task. That’s a great example of being efficient. But it’s not always effective. They’re going to get complaints from senders who think the answer is incomplete or people who still have more questions.
Balancing Effectiveness and Efficiency
The challenge here is that sometimes in order to accomplish what you want, you have to play around with strategies that may not work. This enables you to determine what is the most effective—and then you can work to make it efficient.
A lot of business leaders or high achievers have to decide what to focus on. But it’s just as important to know what not to do. Many people need to subtract things from their schedules to be more effective.
That will enable you to focus on things that are going to make a difference in the results of the company and lead to increased productivity, since it involves identifying the most important tasks and doing them first.
Doing things quickly doesn’t necessarily lead to productivity. Doing them effectively, and focusing on the right things, is going to get you the result that you want.
I’m not saying don’t be efficient. It’s more a matter of prioritizing what’s going to work best for your business. This is where a lot of folks get jammed up. There’s a constant trade-off where the organization, the business owner, the single agent, or the team focus on one method and then shift to focus on the other.
Balance both by taking action on a task or strategy that has been effective and successful before. Then, as you reflect and prepare to implement it again, improve your process to make it more efficient.
Efficiency is important because you can iterate things over and over to make them quicker and easier to achieve. But it has to be the right action in the first place.
Don’t be the person that says, “I’m getting organized.” Because in real estate, you’re either getting organized for selling real estate.
Instead, do the right things, and as you continue to focus on effective actions, you’ll become more efficient over time.
We all have that limited 24 hours in a day. Make sure you are making the most of it.
