4.61 How to Stop Wasting Time by Trying to Be Too Efficient

So I had a student who was thinking about writing and reading and was getting quite stressed about how much he had to do.

And I'm sure we all kind of empathize with that feeling.

And one of the things that she kept saying was that she wants to be efficient.

She needs to know how to read things, how to take notes in order to be efficient.

She needs to know how to write things in order to be efficient.

And I asked her what she meant by efficient.

While this is going on, so this is in a group coaching format, by the way.

So I'm talking to her on screen, but then we've got the rest of the members online as well watching this happen.

And they're jumping in the chat going, yeah, yeah, me too, me too.

Tell us how we need to be more efficient.

I need to be more efficient too.

I'm so inefficient.

And so everybody was really getting on board with this.

And I asked her, what are you meaning by efficient here? Yeah.

And her definition of efficient was, when I've read an article, I want my notes to be good enough that I don't have to go back to it over and over again to find the stuff I need.

I've got my notes.

And when I write, you know, I know I have to do drafts first and stuff, but I don't want to be editing it 47,000 times.

I want to know enough that I write it to a level that will need some editing, but that I won't have to do tons and tons of rewrites to.

And everyone's in the chat going, yeah, yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

Tell us how to do this, Vicky.

Tell us how to do this.

And it was one of those moments where I had to break to them that what they were desiring was the wrong thing.

It's completely understandable that we want to be efficient.

In fact, people are telling us we need to be efficient all the time.