I’ve always been involved in athletics. As a young man, I learned to watch out for the older sporting men. They were always dangerous.

Some, through deterioration, traded skill and stamina for aggression. (Anyone who has played pick-up basketball knows what I’m talking about.) Instead of a good game of ball, it’s a sweaty, painful mess of bony elbows and knees and arbitrary foul calls.

However, there was another kind of older man who is even more dangerous. I’m thinking of my first martial arts instructor. He often cross-trained us with boxing and kick-boxing. I vividly recall one session where all of the young, fit guys did 60 second rounds with him. We’d rotate in, fresh, and rotate out a minute later—beat up and gasping for air. He never looked like he was working hard.

I recall a racquetball instructor I had in college. Must have been in his early 60’s. We were in our late teens and early 20’s. Fit and full of ourselves. He ran us hard all over the court. Sprinting, gasping, diving, swinging. He hardly ever moved. Almost never ran. A Yoda in the back of the court. Delivering pain and humiliation with slight flicks of his wrist.

Efficiency. Few leaders learn it. In the US, a hard work ethic is such a cultural ideal, that we frequently mistake a lot of work for effective work. In a “poor me/look how awesome I am” kind of way we brag about our busy schedules, the work we take home, the 80 hour work week. (I’m still persuaded that the 80 hour workweek is a unicorn. We all talk about it. No one has ever seen someone actually work for 80 hours.)

We mistakenly orient ourselves around time and not around productivity. We mistakenly view less work or less effort as laziness. Time is a lousy metric. What does it tell us? “I worked 60 hours this week!” So? You’ve just learned nothing about what I’ve gotten done. “I’ve been in this job for 25 years!” So? You don’t know anything about what I can actually accomplish. We need to ditch time. It’s important for things like microwaves and free diving. Not important for most jobs.

The most productive people I know, often, don’t seem that busy. They actually seem to have time. They have time. They control their time. They don’t allow time to control them. There might be moments, but I rarely seem them running around hurried and rushed. They don’t talk about how busy there are. (They usually are working hard to be less busy.) Nevertheless, they keep producing more and more.

How can we improve our efficiency?

1. Knowing what we really need to accomplish right now.
2. Being crystal clear about our purpose or the larger picture of what we are trying to accomplish.
3. Saying “No” to anything that isn’t part of the top 2.
4. Protecting our time: Blocking out time for personal reflection or quietness. For important relationships.
5. Protecting our space: Finding or creating places where we can be most productive.
6. Leveraging others abilities. Some call this delegating. It requires learning to be clear about what we want accomplished and, then, trusting others to do it.

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