I think of productivity as doing what you want to do, i.e. you are not immobilized by emotional or mental resistance nor by an inability to do what you want to do. It also commonly means getting more done than you did before, or getting more results than you did before.

It struck me that there are two kinds of productivity improvements - efficiency and effectiveness - and that they have a very different emphasis and a very different outcome.

Efficiency is about more of the same kind of thing done than you did before. It’s about a greater usage of time.

Effectiveness is about getting better results than you did before. It’s about getting more output per unit of time given.

GTD is almost entirely about efficiency and it worries me that it has gripped the imagination of so many people because making an ineffective process more efficient multiplies the rate at which it operates ineffectively. It worries me that people who think that efficiency is the key will work ever more efficiently (which I tend to think of as ‘harder’) and yet end up disappointed because they aren’t making the overall result in their lives better.

Hence the title, you can run faster around the hamster wheel but you’ll never leave the cage.

It’s effectiveness that makes the radical breakthroughs that change your life. You achieve that by looking at the root cause of the problem and you respond to that and not the symptom of problem.

In the book, GTD, David Allen gives a story of an executive who got so many emails that he had to come in at the weekends to get through his inbox. This was stressful and time-consuming for the exec and his department didn’t run smoothly because of the bottleneck. Most of the emails required him to make a decision for his staff.

He then applied GTD methods. The inbox became easy to manage and he could respond quickly to his staff’s needs. Performance went up and everyone was impressed with his ability to manage.

This a very good way to manage the situation efficiently but it’s not how I would approach the problem.

The symptom here was a full inbox. The root cause of all the emails was the fact that his staff were not empowered to make decisions. My advice would be to work out processes by which the staff members could reach the same decision as the executive. It wouldn’t work 100% of the time but it would drastically reduce the number of emails and decision points for the executive in total.

The risk in such an approach is that it might make the executive redundant (see my minor victory in this article). A bright and motivated executive, however, could turn her mind to other areas where she could make things work more effectively too.

Of course, I haven’t had the opportunity to solve problems for executives, so I’m speculating to an extent. Tim Ferriss, of 4 Hour Work Week fame, has empowered his staff with responsibility and decision-making processes and spends about an hour a week on emails and the remaining decisions. He’s a man who left the cage. The executive did not.

That’s the power of effectiveness over efficiency.

If you have an effective process already in place and you don’t want to change it then by all means apply greater efficiency as this will increase your output. Even more effectively, delegate that task to someone else

Yours,
Nick
P.S. I’m gnawing at the bars of my cage. Hope to be on the other side very soon…