Effectiveness Over Efficiency

Good morning & happy Sunday. Swamped with finals so this one will be short. Grab a cup of coffee & sit back.

Thought of the week 💭

Being busy is unproductive: choose effectiveness over efficiency.

We’re all busy… but are the things we’re busy doing being done efficiently, or effectively?

I used to jam-pack my schedule with different things to do. Here is what my Google calendar usually looked like about 1.5/2 months back:

I over-optimized my time to just “get stuff done".

The problem with this is if something takes longer than expected, the next task gets done unwell.

This is a good example of being efficient, not effective. Sure, I got a lot done, but the quality was missing, so I ended up spending more time in the future fixing small errors.

Now I dedicate 1 day to just doing 1 thing as well as I can, even if this means I get less things done.

Here’s the pod of the week that sparked this thought: Tim Ferriss

#2: Tweet of the week 🫨

No time to scroll on twitter this week but here’s a good one.

What’s Brewin’ ☕ 

#1: Death of the phone, rise of the watch

My sleep is 100x better when I don’t look at my phone past 8:00 PM. So I thought, how much better would my day be if I didn’t look at my phone for most of it?

Most of us are addicted to our phones even if we don’t want to admit it. Anytime I wasn’t doing something, I would just look at my phone for no reason at all, other than to not be bored.

Phones make it easy to hide from boredom. Being bored is good. That’s where most of your creativity when you were a kid came from…

We all used to be bored when we were younger. As you get older, you don’t get bored because you’re always just doing things.

This week I tested out replacing my phone with my Apple watch.

I don’t need my phone for anything but texting people, which can be done from my computer (which I’m on most of the day) and my watch.

This makes my phone irrelevant unless its to capture pictures when I go somewhere.

My thoughts on this experiment: It is a must-try, and I will be continuing to do it.

Let’s talk biz 🚦 

futureadmit.com

I take a few “big” swings every few months… this month I got 2 that are pretty epic.

#1: I teamed up with LearnQ.ai 

I’ll be sitting as an advisor on their board and integrating their personalized AI SAT prep into our current program. It is a VC-backed company, currently valued at around $30M, projecting $100M in the future. Can’t say much other than that yet, but when I can I will.

#2: Product

If you asked me 3 months ago where I should re-invest the profits back into, I would have said marketing. After being humbled, I realized the product is the most important thing.

So, I’m working with software devs and the team at learnq.ai to do a few new things this month:

1. SAT AI Prep: Learnq.ai will give our students custom questions & study plans based on their scores from practice tests and practice problems.

2. Video Explanations: After every question, students will be able to see a video explanation. (no-one does this yet)

3. SAT Realistic User Interface: All practice problems will mimic what the real digital SAT looks like.

After these features are in, we’re opening the floodgates on different pricing structures, which I’ll touch on next week.

My Info Diet💡

Swamped with finals, didn’t get to really consume much this week other than Naval’s Almanack.

Signing Off 👋 

I’m leaving you with 1 question:

What are you doing efficiently, but not effectively?