Recently, I heard someone reference this quote by Peter Drucker:

 There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. 1

Efficiency can be valuable, or it can be pointless. It just depends on what you choose to be efficient at doing.

It can be easy to get a lot of things done. But you’ll never have the time or resources to do everything. And so the challenge is determining which of the countless things that could be done are actually worth doing in the first place.

  1. Peter F. Drucker, “Managing for Business Effectiveness,” Harvard Business Review, May 1963, https://hbr.org/1963/05/managing-for-business-effectiveness. ↩︎