Effectiveness is the Goal. Efficiency is the Trick.

Common corporate and business training will teach you to strive after efficiency and effectiveness.
These are both great goals for both a business and an individual, but one can be rather tricky.

What’s the Difference?

Effective:
Adequate to accomplish a purpose; producing the intended or expected result: effective teaching methods; effective steps toward peace.

Efficient:
Performing or functioning in the best possible manner with the least waste of time and effort; having and using requisite knowledge, skill, and industry; competent; capable: a reliable, efficient secretary.

Thanks Dictionary.com!

Effective people always have goals in mind.  Efficient people can be efficient at just about anything.
In other words: you can be efficient without ever having been effective.  If you own a plumbing business, and your plumber plants 1000 flowers in all of your customers’ yards each day- he is being incredibly efficient without ever being effective, as your goal is to have him fix plumbing, not plant flowers.

How to Be Effective

Effective means Accomplishing your Goals.

How do you accomplish goals?  First you should set up some goals.
Goals need to be Realistic, Timely and Specific. To learn more about setting goals, read here.

Set up check points in order to reach these goals.  Keeping track of your goals and forecasting.

Want to be effective?
Do what you say you’re going to do.

Turning Effective into Efficiently Effective

Now just because efficiency can be turned the wrong way does not mean we don’t want it.
Efficiency is crucial to success.
Why? — We only get a limited number of days in our lives.
If we don’t make the most out of each one, we’ll never know how much we could have accomplished.

In order to become efficient, Don’t just pay attention to accomplishing goals- keep track of how long they take.

If you maintain effectiveness but not efficiency, you risk falling behind.

If you maintain efficiency but not effectiveness, you risk never accomplishing anything.

In order to be SUCCESSFUL, you need ot be Both Efficient and Effective.