It’s a Sunday. You’ve just relocated to a familiar neighbourhood and you’re planning to hit the market to buy the necessary stuff for setting up your new home. It’s a long list. What do you do? Dive headlong and get started with ticking off items off the list or take a few minutes to plan out how to go about buying the items so that it takes the least amount of time?
While the latter seems the logical and obvious choice, most of us are victims of deciding on instant gratification and a false notion of efficiency i.e. we end up following the first approach. The reason being, it provides a false notion of saving time instead of wasting it on unnecessary planning (after all who needs a plan to buy household stuff) and ticking off items on a list gives a sense of accomplishment. But if the list is long, all this comes at the cost of time.
On the other hand, if we take an extra 5–10 minutes to sit down, group the items based on where they can be brought together and plan on a route where the required shops come one after another, this will save us a lot of time and in the end, prove to be more satisfactory. After all, ticking off 20+ items is a lot more accomplishment than ticking of 1 to 2 items again and again.
The above analogy is applicable for any resource intensive task at hand. With the objective of getting things done one after the other and ticking it off the to-do list, if we take some time to analyse the task at hand, spend a few minutes on the optimal approach and then proceed ahead with the execution, a much better outcome with lesser time may be the end result. We should not let our right-side brain (the emotional side) get the better when deciding on accomplishing any task. Our approach should always be prepared and hyper-logical when it comes to the operational side of things. Else a few minutes of laziness can end up costing hours of our limited time in a day.
As some one rightly said, “If I’m given four hours to cut a tree, I’ll spend the first three sharpening the axe”.
Thank you for your time.
See you tomorrow!!!
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