Living an Effective and Efficient Life

Disclaimer: Tulisan ini mungkin akan terasa absurd untuk dibaca para penganut paham “let-it-flow, enjoy-the-ride, let’s-see-where-life-brings-me”. If you are the one and still insist to read, be prepared,, and try to provide your constructive feedback =)

Background
I believe most of you who are reading this note has already heard the terms of Effective and Efficient. You occasionally heard that in school, workplace, TV, etc. But how many of you know the real meaning of those words? What is effective anyway? What is efficient? And what are the main distinctions of those two delightful words?

I initially got the real meaning of those two words during my undergraduate study in Bandung. To put it simple, here are the main differences:

Effective – Do the right things

Efficient – Doing things right

These words are two common and relevant terms in any kind of organization; spanning from big to small, government to private, intra-school organization to political party, manufacturing-based to natural resource/agricultural-based. Every organization wants to be effective and efficient in a way they do things, simply said: no pain-in-the-ass. Hence, achieving their main objective would not be any hassle.

Effective and Efficient in Broader Context
Tonight, unlike any other night, I suddenly got an interesting thought. What if I use the analogy of doing things effectively and efficiently into what I am doing right now in life? As a human being, of course I want to make a meaningful life (come on, we live this life only once right? Even if you believe in reincarnation, your memory will eventually be erased just like how C-3PO and R2-D2 forgot who their maker/Anakin Skywalker is). To ensure it has a meaning, we need objectives to be achieved. To make sure it could be achieved in certain period of time, we need to make a plan for it. And since our time in this life is limited, we need to make it MORE EFFECTIVE and MORE EFFICIENT.

CMIIW, but to me it all makes sense and sounds logically correct =)

So, after the WHAT, let us discuss the HOW.

Effective: To do what you love
The magic words are: DO THE RIGHT THINGS. In my current business, I need to ensure that in everything that I do, I am doing something that needs to be done. Since the objective is maximizing the profit from the chickens being produced and sold, then everything I do should refers back to that objective. If what I do hinders me to do so, then I should reconsider taking a step back and reviewing whether I am doing the right things.

In life, I believe it is no different. The objective is a meaningful life. To make it meaningful, we need passion. And to be passionate, we need love. Simply ‘do what we love’ (or to some people ‘love what you do’). If something that we do is not within our scope of passion, then, again you need to take a step back and reconsider whether you are already doing the RIGHT THING for your life.

Efficient: Doing what you love in a most “cost-effective” manner
After knowing what we are going to do, we are facing a culprit by the name of CONSTRAINT. As a mere human being, we have limitation. Just like a company who has due date limit in closing their account payable or limited resource to acquire an asset, people also have lots of limitation. We can not do everything that we want to do. Modern people tends to consider themselves as multi-tasker, yet they will eventually find that it will make them less productive. Hence, PRIORITIZATION is the key to overcome the barrier.

To be able to reach the optimized state of what we want to reach, we need to understand our limitation. Generally, the limitation which respectively becomes our cost is divided into two things: TIME and CAPITAL/ASSET (include money).

You may find Pareto 80:20 concept is very relevant here, doing more things with less effort. We ONLY do the most important things that contribute significantly to the end results.

Closing
Life is short, don’t waste it.

May you find this useful.

Jakarespati Wiradisuria
00.2767
Thursday, 20/08/09 – 12.55am