Success Book ~ The 4-Hour Work week

Excerpt from The 4-Hour Work Week written by Timothy Ferriss

Being Effective vs. Being Efficient

Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.
I would consider the best door to door salesperson efficient – that is, refined and excellent at selling door to door without wasting time – but utterly ineffective. He or she would sell more using a better vehicle such as e-mail or direct mail.
This is also true for the person who checks e-mail 30 times per day and develops an elaborate system of folder rules and sophisticated techniques for ensuring that each of those 30 brain farts moves as quickly as possible. I was a specialist at such professional wheel-spinning. It is efficient on some perverse level, but far from effective.
Here are two truisms to keep in mind:

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

From this moment onward, remember this: What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich