Author: Undre Griggs / Source: Lifehack
In this article you will discover the key difference between productivity and efficiency, and which one will help you achieve your goals.
Productivity vs efficiency is a discussion between quantity and quality. A productive person is known as someone who gets things done.
Although their accomplishments may be short-lived if they did not build their strategy for the long-haul. In most of our lives, productivity and efficiency are at odds with each other.When you are focusing on productivity, your efficiency is the first thing to suffer. Likewise, when you are confirming your plans are thoughtful and well-crafted, you run the risk of burying your goal in months of red tape.
Productivity In Your Life
Measuring productivity tends to be straightforward, so it is usually where people place their focus. People usually calculate productivity by measuring a person’s output during two similar time periods. For example, if you read two books in January and four books in February, you were more productive in February.
Businesses will calculate productivity by comparing employees, departments, and locations. For instance, the California office of a firm generated $60,000 in March, while the Florida office generated $50,000 in the same month, making the California office more productive.
Productivity’s Blind Spot
Because most people measure productivity by calculating output, you have probably felt at least once in your life that productivity was capturing the complete picture.
If your supervisor asks you for a report by end of day, they are thinking it is a reasonable request. While it is true the report only takes 30 minutes to create, that is not the only thing you are working on today.
If the report was your only task, you agree you should have it completed by the end of the day. However, your department added a new employee and you agreed to train them on all the processes.
Depending on the complexity of your role and the engagement of the trainee, it could take you an entire day to walk step-by-step through your work. You also have a few additional time sensitive matters that you accepted last week and they have the same deadline.
As you are starting to see, when you only capture someone’s output to determine if they are being productive, you are lacking key information.
You open yourself up to the possibility of thinking someone had a less productive week, when they were more productive than last week.
Efficiency, the Other Half of the Productivity Coin
If productivity focuses on your output, then efficiency emphasizes the quality of your work, which usually focuses on saving time or conserving resources.
Think of your productivity as the revenue you generated from a sale, and think of your efficiency as the money you get to take home after you pay your expenses.
Using the business example from before, while the California office generated $60,000 in sales, they spent $20,000 in related seminar and travel expenses. The Florida office generated their sales by using an inexpensive online-webinar platform, so the Florida office was more efficient and generated larger profits.
Efficiency also accounts for quality in relation to time.
For example, Autumn and Alek work in a call-center where their job was to survey 100 customers per day. Autumn reached her number after she called 150 customers and Alek reached her number after calling 300 customers.
While they both achieved their productivity milestone, Autumn was more efficient because she only had to call an extra 50 people, while Alek had to call an additional 200 people.
Is There Such a Thing as Being Too Efficient?
Like productivity, focusing solely on efficiency can lead to unintended consequences. You do not want to complete your work hastily, but you also do not want to set the unreasonable expectation that you can achieve perfection.
Challenges, missteps, and failure are a part of growth and achieving results.
Whenever you focus too much on quality, you will find yourself coping with self-doubt, anxiety, and procrastination. If you are in a leadership position, your team may be too scared to produce anything because they are so worried about making a mistake.
Out of fear, everyone remains in the analysis phase as they continue to plan for every possible outcome. Even though it is tempting to celebrate successful perfectionists like…
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