The Difference Between Being Effective and Being Efficient in Achieving Your Goals
When it comes to goal setting, there is a huge difference between being effective and being efficient.
This article provides a definition of what both terms mean and then provides you with tips to help you combine them to achieve your goals and reach for the stars.
Lets start with the definitions. There are many definitions of the two terms, but the definitions below relate particularly well to goal setting:
Effective: This term means that you can adequately achieve or complete a particular project, tasks or goal. It doesn’t specifically relate to time frame, or how correctly you do something, but it means when you do something you complete it to a standard that is expected.
Efficient: Efficiency relates more to how quickly you do something. If you do something well, via a streamlined process, you could be said to be efficient.
As detailed above there is a big different between being effective and being efficient, when it comes to goal setting.
One of the main reasons is that to be efficient at something, doesn’t mean you are actually achieving more. You can do something efficiently, but if it is not effective, then you will be wasting your time.
For example, you might be efficient at using a computer, but it won’t be effective unless the particular tasks you are efficient at are bringing you closer to your goals.
To be successful in goal setting, you need to be both effective and efficient. We provide the following tips to help you:
- Worry about being effective first: As a first step you need to focus being effective. Look at your goals, and ascertain what key things you would need to be doing to achieve them.
- Focus on being efficient second: Once you know what tasks will effectively help you work towards your goals, you can focus on become efficient. In other words, look at ways to improve each tasks so that you save time and become more productive. For example, if one of your goals is to use social media to promote an online business, you may use a service that lets you update all of your social media accounts at once.
- Re-evaluate: Once you start working on the above two tasks, you need to be constantly re-evaluating how you are doing things and ascertaining if you could do anything else that would make you more productive.
As you can see, there is a big difference between being effective and being efficient when it comes to goal setting.
Summarizing, Focus on effective first, followed by efficient second, then tie these together by constantly re-evaluating your progress. Here’s to your goal setting success.
If you want to learn how to finally achieve your goals, then check out our free goal setting e-book and ezine at Goals Setting
by Rusty O’Connor
Rusty O’Connor has been an avid goal setter for the past 10 years and has written numerous goal setting and time management articles and has provided in-depth advice to numerous clients. Outside of goal setting and time management, Rusty enjoys Internet Marketing, rock climbing, surfing and traveling. Rusty is married with four young children and currently lives as an expat in the Middle East. Here’s to your goal setting success!
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