Effectiveness Dissected: A Map of Personal Effectiveness

Effectiveness is more important than efficiency. In Tim Ferriss’ words, “What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.” Last week I wrote about what I believe is the single most important ingredient of effectiveness (which is clarity). Now in this post, I’d like to expand the idea to give you a map of personal effectiveness. You will see the two components of effectiveness, and the required abilities you should hone for each of them.

First of all, there is a question we need to answer: how do you know that you are effective? Here is my simple answer to this question:

You are effective if you are doing what is right to do.

Simple, isn’t it? From this answer, you can see that there are actually two components of personal effectiveness:

  1. Knowing what is right to do, and
  2. Actually doing it

Now let’s look at them in more details:

  1. Knowing what is right to do
    How do you know what is right to do? This is where the idea in The Single Most Important Ingredient of Effectiveness comes into play: to know what is right to do, you need clarity. It is clarity that allows you to figure out what is truly important to you. The biggest enemy of clarity is noise, so the action you need to take is minimizing noise. You can read my article about it for more details.
  2. Actually doing it
    Knowing what is right to do is just half the equation. It is useless to know what you are supposed to do if you don’t actually do them. To actually do what is right, you need to overcome distractions to do otherwise. All distractions can actually be summarized into one: short-term pleasures. So, the action you need to take is ignoring short-term pleasures. Since the things you are supposed to do are often uncomfortable, only by being able to ignore short-term pleasures can you actually do them.

As you can see, there are two abilities which are crucial to effectiveness:

  1. The ability to minimize noise
  2. The ability to ignore short-term pleasures

All your effort to increase personal effectiveness should be focused on honing these two abilities. Having only one of them is not enough. You may end up knowing what to do but don’t actually do them because of the distractions (#1 without #2), or you may be willing to do anything but end up doing the wrong things due to the lack of clarity (#2 without #1).

All these can be summarized in this map of personal effectiveness:

By minimizing noise you will know what is right to do. By ignoring short-term pleasures you will actually do it.

7 Comments

  1. You know what Donald, as I read your first post here, and then progress downwards, I saw your face again… 😛 your smile is contagious. I like your blog!

  2. Thanks, Peace 🙂 I hope I can share something useful through this blog.

  3. […] Life Optimizer has a nice Map of Personal Effectiveness. […]

  4. […] (Denne artikkelen er en hybrid. Jeg har lenge hatt en artikkel kalt “Retning og bevegelse” liggende i kladdearkivet mitt. Disse to begrepene, retning og bevegelse har vært mine kjepphester over lang tid nÃ¥, som privatperson, arbeidstaker og arbeidsgiver, fordi de pÃ¥ en god mÃ¥te illustrerer grunnlaget for Ã¥ utvikle en bedrift, Ã¥ nÃ¥ et mÃ¥l og/eller Ã¥ fÃ¥ en jobb gjort. Men den har blitt liggende, dels fordi jeg har vært innom disse greiene i andre artikler, dels fordi jeg manglet ett eller annet… SÃ¥ kommer altsÃ¥ en som heter Donald Latumahima og skriver en artikkel han kaller Effectiveness Dissected: A Map of Personal Effectiveness pÃ¥ Lifeoptimizer.org. Han setter fingeren pÃ¥ det ømme punktet og skriver godt, og setter nøyaktige ord pÃ¥ mine egne tanker. SÃ¥ da har jeg fÃ¥tt det jeg trengte for Ã¥ fullføre min egen artikkel. Bare synd at det nÃ¥ blir snylteblogging for det meste. Bare begrepene er nÃ¥ mine egne.) […]

  5. Thanks again Donald , you gave a blueprint to help me with overcoming procrastionation. Nothing sems to be left out.

  6. You’re right, Dee. This map can also be used to deal with procrastination, especially the “ignore short-term pleasures” part. That’s why we procrastinate: we choose short-term pleasures over what is right to do.

  7. […] (Denne artikkelen er en hybrid. Jeg har lenge hatt en artikkel kalt “Retning og bevegelse” liggende i kladdearkivet mitt. Disse to begrepene, retning og bevegelse har vært mine kjepphester over lang tid nÃ¥, som privatperson, arbeidstaker og arbeidsgiver, fordi de pÃ¥ en god mÃ¥te illustrerer grunnlaget for Ã¥ utvikle en bedrift, Ã¥ nÃ¥ et mÃ¥l og/eller Ã¥ fÃ¥ en jobb gjort. Men den har blitt liggende, dels fordi jeg har vært innom disse greiene i andre artikler, dels fordi jeg manglet ett eller annet… SÃ¥ kommer altsÃ¥ en som heter Donald Latumahima og skriver en artikkel han kaller Effectiveness Dissected: A Map of Personal Effectiveness pÃ¥ Lifeoptimizer.org. Han setter fingeren pÃ¥ det ømme punktet og skriver godt, og setter nøyaktige ord pÃ¥ mine egne tanker. SÃ¥ da har jeg fÃ¥tt det jeg trengte for Ã¥ fullføre min egen artikkel. Bare synd at det nÃ¥ blir snylteblogging for det meste. Bare begrepene er nÃ¥ mine egne.) […]

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