Since I began studying at Stockholm School of Economcs the terms efficiency and effectiveness have been discussed in different contexts.

Doing things right versus doing the right things. Efficiency is connected to productivity wheras effectiveness is more goal-oriented.

During our daily reaction, we reflect over how well we have been effective, that is, done the right things, having fulfilled our intentions with our day. But also how efficient we have been. Looking threw my reactions I have noticed that during hectical periods, like exam periods, my intentions are concentrated upon doing as much as possible. When I am not fulfilling what I have planned, I get more stressed and are studying less effective. I end up being in a catch 22, where I forget that it is more important that I understand what I read than how productive I am. Therefore, in order to be able to rate how well I have fulfilled my intentions, I believe that I need to start focusing on both efficency and effectiveness during exam periods.

Whenever and whatever you are doing something you always need to bring you body and work from it. This may seem obvious but let me explain where I’m going with this. Therefore we are always affected by it and in what condition it is in.

Earlier, I talked a lot about the importance of feeling good to perform well and make good decisions. So the complexity I’m trying to shed some light on here is that performance is also highly affected by how we feel physically.

What I want to communicate with this is that if we what to perform well, make good decisions and consequently be effective we need to take good care of our bodies, so they do not hold us back, but instead lift us up.  A good way of putting this is: “If you don’t take time to take care of you body, you will sooner or later need to take time off to bee sick”.

All people sometimes make bad decisions. Some my claim that there is no reason or correlation between the bad decision and some other factor; that bad decisions “just happen”. If assuming that good decisions are those leading to efficiency and bad decisions are directly related to inefficiency. I believe that finding a way to continuously make good decisions, thus is one core aspect of being efficient.

The problem is that we do all make bad decisions. As bad decisions are made, the focus is shifted from the right things, to irrelevant things. So why do bad decision occur? I believe that bad decisions come from situations and times when we don’t feel well, from times when we are in a bad state of mind.

So how do we avoid making bad decision? It is simple. Don’t make decisions when you don’t fell really good. So when your boss, wife, friend ore parent comes to you and need you to make a decision about something really important, you simply say “sorry I don’t fell good right know so it has to wait…”. Well, I guess that’s not always possible.

It is of course impossible to always fell great when you make decisions. Therefore, my advice to become more efficient in terms of decision making, is to try to as often as I can make my decisions when I feel good.

I enjoy getting assignments done fast. I have always been that way, it doesn’t matter if it’s sports or schoolwork. Also I am a very fast learner so usually I am capable of working fast if I want to. However(!), when I work fast I have a tendency of being a little sloppy. I’ll forget to double check details, when I read an assignment I’ll miss a few words that make a crucial difference to what I am supposed to do. Usually this is not a problem. When I am taking an exam I have learnt to slow down my reading so that I will take in every word and when I’m writing an assignment I always make sure to double check my writing. BUT, when it comes to homework I am still rushing.

Today I had scheduled only one thing that I had to get done, my finance homework. You’re supposed to finish twelve assignments online and get at least 50 % right to pass the homework. I didn’t finish. The reason why I didn’t finish was because I would read the assignments too quick, mess up and then loose patience and mess up again.

This quality of mine has it’s upsides and its downsides. I can get things done extremely fast and if I am focused while doing it the result is great. However when I’m not paying attention working fast can actually cause a task to take much longer. My solution is to always evaluate the assignment before hand from now on. What is the best way to take on this task? Should I work fast and then double check or do I need to be extremely focused and accurate from the very start. Different projects need different takes on them.

During my time studying I have experienced problems with planning my studies in a specific course, and have thus not been able to reach the goals that I sat up for myself.

The cause is that I have never been able to get an overview of the work load that I have had and therefore never been able to estimate how much time I needed to study and how I should allocate my time for the various courses.

With lean thinking (jit and jidoka), I have been able to create a visual overview of my studies and with thus been able to estimate how much time I need to spend on each of the courses to be able to reach the goal that I have set up for each course.

If you want inspiration to try to create something similar for the planning of you studies, you can take a look at my planning table. It is in Swedish [apologies for my English speaking readers] but I think you will understand the concept.