The accumulated efficiency effect

Feeling stressed, strained, worried or overwhelmed by all your tasks and responsibilities?  Read on…

Anytime you do something more than once, pause to consider how a more efficient approach could save you time instead of just doing enough to complete the task now.  The key is to always calculate time savings on an annual basis and to take this approach with a lot of tasks.  Over the course of a single year, the efficiencies accumulate and have a significant impact.  This is what I call the accumulated efficiency effect.

Let’s say you type a very similar two paragraph email twice a month.  It takes you four and a half minutes each time.  Whenever the occasion arises, four and half minutes never seem costly enough to put a better process in place.

What if you took thirty seconds to save the text as a template?  Now you’re saving four minutes twice a month.  Remember, the key is to think about time savings over a year.  If you save eight minutes a month, you’ll save an hour and a half a year. If you do this for ten or twenty other tasks, the time savings each year start to add up to workdays or workweeks.  Now the extra thirty second doesn’t seem so trivial.

So how do you start?  Every time you encounter a repeat task, pause to consider how you can do it more efficiently and how much time you could save in a year.  If the time savings is motivating, take the extra time to become more efficient, whether that means setting up a process, delegating, mastering a tool or the like.  A good place to start is to focus on opportunities to save twenty times the time required to become more efficient.  Aim to save a week a year.  Take a vacation.