Difference between Effectiveness and Efficiency

Hello friends!

Today I would like to comment with you about a very important concept that we study in administration and psychology, especially in organizational psychology, in the area of ​​Human Resources, in short, in the area that unites administration and psychology: what is the difference between being effective and being efficient ?

As the two words are very similar, it is very common for them to be confused. In practice, the difference between them is very big and very important for any project related to the management of a group of people or even the personal management of our own time and resources.

Effectiveness is behaving in order to achieve your goals or to get closer and closer to achieving them. Efficiency is performing a certain behavior in order to reduce the resources needed for the objective to be achieved.

In summary: to be effective is to be able, in the end, to reach your objective, your goal. Efficiency is structuring the path so that the objective is achieved in less time or with fewer resources.

If you understand the difference well, you will have noticed that the most important thing for our change lies in improving our efficiency.

For example, when I was studying psychology in São João del-Rei, I was invited to attend a French course on Saturdays, free of charge. As I have always been interested in foreign languages, I accepted right away because I had already had a base before. However, the class was very disappointing as the teacher had no interest in teaching the contents in a quick or practical way.

For him, if he taught two phrases and one verb per class, everything would be fine, as time didn’t matter to him. Thus, learning a foreign language in twenty years or in four years, for him, did not matter.

In this sense, the teacher was being effective in his activity of teaching us French. His goal would be achieved – in 20 years! And that is to be effective, that is, to be able to achieve a certain objective.

But see what a difference if he were also efficient! It could teach us the new language in 4, 5 years! After all, any language course – which we pay for – has to be efficient, otherwise it runs the risk of losing its students.

Do you understand the difference now between being effective and being efficient? The teacher would be ineffective if he couldn’t teach us French. He did, but very slowly. With that he was effective, but not efficient. If he was efficient he could reach the goal with less resources, or rather, in less time.

The importance of efficiency

I said above that efficiency should be considered more relevant than effectiveness. Of course, being ineffective doesn’t help either. But what I wanted to stress is that the key to change is changing efficiency.

Let’s say someone is writing a book. The objective, therefore, is to write a book, for example, of 300 pages. If this person can write the book, it will be effective. If you cannot write, you will be ineffective.

Considering that the objective is achieved, wouldn’t it make all the difference to have written the book in 1 year, instead of in 10 years? Of course, we can think that in 10 years we can write a better book, with more quality and more technique. However, perfectionism often hides a great inefficiency that will perhaps be ineffective, with the possible abandonment of the project.

I will give a personal example. When we enter a master’s or a doctorate, it is very common for us to go through phases in which writing is blocked. We try to write and nothing comes up. One day a few years ago I had a very interesting experience.

As usual, I opened a new Word file and started writing. I wrote about a page. I thought I wasn’t doing very well and stopped. I stopped writing for a week. After I got back to writing, I started from scratch – on this part. In fact, I didn’t even remember writing that last page. And what happened left me very surprised: when I went to compare the page from a week ago with the new page, I noticed that the paragraphs and even the sentences were very similar! Almost identical!

Moral of the story: when I started to criticize my own writing and, with this pseudo-perfectionism, I stopped for a week. In other words, I put back a week what I could have written that day or the next day.

And this is very frequent. How many and how many times do we leave for later what we can truly do now?

If we do what we have to do now and if we do it faster, in less time and with fewer resources, we will not only be more effective, but also much more efficient. And, by being efficient, we will be advancing our life.

If the project is to write a book in 1 year, why not? Why let 10 years go by? Why not write 10 books in those 10 years?

Anyway, the idea here is that by being more effective, we can do more.

And remembering that the asset, the greatest wealth we have is time. If we manage to do a task in less time, we will be gaining more time to do other tasks. So the idea that time is money is wrong. It’s not that time is money, but having time makes us rich, not only to earn more money, but also to be able to have a better quality of life and a more prosperous life.

Conclusion

In this text, we talk about the important difference between effectiveness and efficiency. Although both concepts are very important, I paid special attention to the concept of efficiency, insofar as – when we try and manage to be more efficient – ​​we earn more: more time and more money, opening space for other activities to be carried out, when we could still be standing still. and paralyzed in some activity by irrelevant issues, like an ideal of perfectionism.

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