GTD Dictionary: Effectiveness

November 5th 2008   GTD Dictionary   0 comments

Effective:

• Producing or capable of producing an intended result.
• Doing something adequately to accomplish a purpose.

Effectiveness is all about doing the right things. While what projects and tasks one can class as appropriate to do will vary between situations and individuals, the general rule of thumb is to determine how much value the task will provide to you (or the company) by doing it. If attending a conference full of open minded people will lead to lots of new clients, that is an high value task making good use of your time and energy. However, if you were to start randomly ringing people up from your phonebook in the hopes of raising business that would be a poor choice of task, likely to result in minimal rewards for the amount of time it sucks up.

A lot of productivity is about how efficiently you do something, with what you’re actually working on a seperate issue entirely. However, this often leads to doing work for the sake of it or just generally falling into a state of busyness. Just because work is done well, does not make it worth doing, however. Effectiveness is significant because without a careful consideration of what tasks you should be doing, you will inevitably end up wasting time and energy on unnecessary work. A common tool for determining what work is most worth doing is the 80/20 rule, which basically states that 20% of inputs result in 80% of your outputs. Applied to effectiveness this means that by carefully shifting more of your time and energy onto those 20% of tasks you will see a significant increase in results.

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