#439 How to be more efficient (and effective)

Squiggly Careers

The Squiggly Career

Management, Careers, Business

5 • 809 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2024

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you ever feel like you're not spending your time well at work then this week's episode will be a useful listen for you. Helen and Sarah talk through practical actions to help you be efficient (doing things right) and effective (getting the right things done). They discuss when a focus on efficiency can go too far and how to get the best balance for you and the people you work with. They share 5 ideas to help you to be more efficient with your time, your tasks, your meetings, your emails and your network. You can find the PodSheet, PodNote and full transcript for the episode at https://www.amazingif.com/listen/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Helen and I'm Sarah.
0:05.0	And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we talk about the ins, outs, ups and downs of work and try to help you with a bit of squiggly career support so that you have a bit more confidence and control over your career development.
0:18.0	And today we are talking about how to be more efficient and a little bit
0:23.1	more effective as well at work, because we basically had a bit of a caveat that we couldn't just go
0:27.5	with efficiency without talking about effectiveness at the same time. And when you start to think about
0:32.9	being efficient at work, it's quite interesting to explore, like what do you mean by that? Like, what does it
0:39.1	look like to be efficient? Because I think it's something that we all strive for. Like,
0:44.1	who doesn't want to be more efficient? Because sort of in your mind, you think, well,
0:48.4	that's going to save me time. That's working in a smart way. So I think we can see sort of the upsides and the outcomes,
0:56.7	but we're not always necessarily sure, like, well, what does it mean that I'm trying to do?
1:01.1	And when I was looking at kind of different ways of describing it, if you look at it in sort of
1:05.2	economic terms, so a lot of people talk about like the economy being efficient, people talk a lot
1:10.2	about like minimizing inputs and maximizing outputs.
1:14.4	And I was like, okay, I don't think I can really work with that.
1:18.0	It's a bit robotic, isn't it?
1:20.1	It's short, but I'm not sure it helps me with like, what am I trying to do?
1:25.1	As somebody I think as well, who is not naturally,
1:33.1	I'm not naturally attracted to or drawn by being more efficient. I don't, I don't look at that and go, yes, please, in the way that maybe some other people might. So I was like, okay,
1:37.2	well, that doesn't really work for me. And we've actually written a bit about efficiency in our new books. I was like, okay, well, let's have a look at how we've described it there. And this is a bit work in progress, and it's not a short, but we've written
1:49.0	not wasting energy or effort so that you can achieve the things you want to in the best possible
1:55.1	way. And I thought, oh, yeah, I think I would, I'd buy into that a bit more. Like, I don't want to waste energy or effort.
2:01.2	You know, you don't want to put your energy and effort in the wrong places. You get that that
	...

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