Efficiency isn’t always Good

You only need to be fast at things you’ll do more than once.

If you liked reading this, please click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Thanks!

Most jobs are all about efficiency. The faster you complete a task, the better. Time is literally money, and businesses reward efficiency for saving money. 

Except efficiency is not always better! Efficiency is great when you think about an assembly line where you’ll assemble thousands of items, because saving time for each item adds up. But what if you only need to assemble one? Is efficiency worth it?

No.

The time and effort required to do something efficiently is never worth it if you’re only going to do something once. Depending on the task, the cost of becoming efficient might not be worth paying unless you will perform the task quite a lot! In these cases, doing the task inefficiently is faster overall. 

Since efficiency is such a core priority of most companies, this can seem counter-intuitive. Even worse, it can be hard to convince people that efficiency is not worth the effort! Efficiency is part of the core culture, and that can be difficult to push against. 

Here are some examples of when efficiency is a waste of time:

• Spending time customizing your CRM before you’ve sold your first customer. If you’ve worked in a large organization it might feel strange to sell without a CRM, but until you’ve sold your first few deals you don’t even know who your customer is yet! Use a spreadsheet first, then add a CRM when you know who you are selling.

• Investing in your brand before you have Product/Market Fit. It’s easy to convince yourself that a great brand will make growth easier, and it’s easy to rattle off examples of big companies with great brands. However, until you have Product/Market Fit you don’t know who your brand needs to speak to and how! 

• Optimizing hiring before you have onboarding in place. It can be exciting to scale up the number of people on your team quickly, but if you don’t have the processes to support them it will just waste time. The last thing you want is a lot of expensive people not knowing what to do and no way to figure it out. That happens a lot when teams scale prematurely!

There are countless other examples, and I’m sure you’ve seen some of them. Startup companies are often told “Do things that don’t scale” which is another way of saying that efficiency doesn’t matter at small scales. All that matters is getting the job done, even if it’s inefficient. 

This is one of the key advantages that startups have over larger companies. While the large company prematurely invests effort to make something efficient (and wastes time), the startup has already done it inefficiently and is moving onto the next thing. That leads to a massive speed difference. 

There are cases where optimization makes sense at the beginning. If you need to mail 1,000 packages to customers it’s worth figuring out how to do it as fast as possible so you don’t spend months on the task. But those are rare, since you almost always want to ramp up scale and you can optimize along the way. 

The easiest way to know that you’re prematurely optimizing something is that everyone talks about the way things will be at scale before you’ve even started. You should talk about right now, and what you’re doing today. Getting ahead of efficiency is good, but there will be time for that later when and if the scale comes. 

So, don’t worry about going slow at first. It will be faster in the end.

---

For more on Productivity, see:

• You Don’t Work For Your Calendar

• Unlocking Your Peak Performance

• The Other Bucket

• Say/Do Ratio

---