Choose effectiveness over the long run, over efficiency.

[00:00:00] **Aurooba:** You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? Would you rather be effective or efficient? In the most ideal world, being effective is efficient, but that's not always how it seems in the beginning. For example, let's say that you know a certain way of doing a project is a more effective, it's a more useful way, of doing the project because by doing it in that way, you are setting it up for long-term sustainable success.

[00:00:51] **Aurooba:** However, , even though you know about that way of doing things, you don't actually know how to put that in [00:01:00] action, right? Maybe it's a new tool or a new strategy or a new way of doing something and learning all of that at first is gonna be very inefficient, and that might make you think it's very ineffective.

[00:01:18] **Aurooba:** However, I mean, there are times, there are times when efficiency will win out over effectiveness. There are times at work, for example, that time will be more important and you will just do things in the tried and true manner that you already know. But if you can carve out the ability, time, and space to cultivate new skills that on the outset

[00:01:49] **Aurooba:** will make you less efficient, but in the long term will make you more effective? That's, that's worth thinking about. I made [00:02:00] that choice a few years ago in my own work, there was a way of doing projects that I knew how to do, I could make and create and ship projects really easily with that method. And then a new method came along.

[00:02:16] **Aurooba:** A new method that was untested, untried, but I could immediately see it was going to change things. So I made the time to learn it and it was very difficult. It was a very difficult three months, and I was constantly frustrated and I was constantly annoyed and I felt slow and a dumb, and none of us like to feel dumb, you know?

[00:02:49] **Aurooba:** But after those three months, everything started to click and I was starting to do things really quickly again. I was [00:03:00] starting to feel like myself again at work and when I looked at the kind of work I was doing, the kind of results, this new strategy, this new way of doing my projects was bringing me and the kind of happiness it was bringing my clients? That made it all worth it.

[00:03:19] **Aurooba:** And I knew that yes, it had taken three long, arduous months to get here, but I was doing the most effective thing in the long term for myself, and for my projects, and for my clients. So we have to care about efficiency, but we have to care more about effectiveness and sometimes being effective, that means that you have to forget about efficiency just for a little while, because often becoming or being or staying effective, [00:04:00] means learning new things and learning new things, by definition, is inefficient.

[00:04:08] **Aurooba:** That's what makes it like learning. You have to struggle. You have to strive. It's not natural, it's not easy, but sometimes you have to care a little bit more about the long term and the short term, especially if we want to achieve our goals, which almost always involve an element of learning something new or practicing something new.

[00:04:33] **Aurooba:** So yeah. Sometimes being effective requires you to be temporarily inefficient in your day or in your work. You know? Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.