Be single-minded!
To be effective means to be successful in producing a desired or intended result. It means achieving our goals.
To be efficient, on the other hand, means achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.
We want to be both effective and efficient.
Do you struggle with many competing priorities and find that at the end of a day, a week or a month, you still have many items remaining in your to-do list?
Try this:
Sit down with your to-do list and decide what your priority is. It may very well be that you have a long list of tasks that are required to complete a larger goal. If that is the case, define those overarching goals. Then, as Gary Keller suggests in his book “The one thing”, identify what’s most important and give it your undivided attention. That’s right. Become single-minded!
The greatest enemy of effectiveness is conflicting priorities. The greatest enemy of efficiency is multitasking. When you decide what your most important goal is, you are becoming effective. When you give it your undivided attention, you are becoming efficient.
We all complain of not having enough time to reach our goals. The fact of the matter is that we are the ones controlling how we invest our time. Tim Ferriss, author of the Four Hour Work Week, says that if you don’t have time, you don’t have priorities. When we try to accomplish too many things at the same time we are very ineffective. We consume a lot of time switching from one activity to the next, whereas when we know what our main priority, our “one thing”, is and we focus our time and energy on it, we achieve extraordinary results.
All of this is simple, but I warn you, it is not easy. Defining priorities is tough. When you decide what your top priority is, you have to say no to anything else that is not aligned with it. That is often hard. But it is worth it. Very few people achieve what they want because they don’t give it enough focus and concentration.
Give it a try at being single-minded and enjoy the results!
