Recently, I have noticed that I am becoming less efficient.
For many years, I liked having a clear schedule. I decided what I needed to do, assigned time for it, and tried to follow the plan. If I had three things to accomplish that morning, finishing those three things meant that I had used my time well.
It worked.
That discipline helped me accomplish many things in my life.
But recently, I have been living somewhat differently.
I still have plans, but I do not always force myself to follow them. Sometimes I begin working on one thing, become interested in another thought, start reading something completely different, or simply spend time thinking.
Before I realize it, the original schedule is gone.
Sometimes I look back and think, I wasted a lot of time today.
And perhaps I did.
But something interesting has also been happening.
Occasionally, during those apparently inefficient hours, a new idea emerges. It may have nothing to do with what I originally planned to accomplish that day. Yet sometimes that idea changes how I think about my work, my life, or even the next ten years.
That made me wonder whether there are actually two kinds of efficiency.
The first is execution efficiency:
How much of what I planned did I accomplish today?
I have spent most of my life becoming good at this.
But there may be another kind—directional efficiency:
Am I becoming clearer about what is actually worth doing?
These are not always the same.
I can have an extremely productive day and complete everything on my schedule without ever questioning whether those things are still where I should be putting my energy.
On the other hand, I can have a seemingly unproductive morning in which very little gets completed, yet discover one idea that changes my direction for years.
Of course, this can easily become an excuse for distraction.
Not everything that interrupts my schedule is meaningful. Much of it is simply noise.
So perhaps the deeper challenge is learning to distinguish between:
noise that steals attention
and
signals that deserve attention.
I used to protect my schedule from almost everything that tried to interrupt it.
Now I wonder whether that efficiency sometimes made it harder to hear quieter signals.
A thought that keeps returning.
A conversation that unexpectedly stays with me.
A question that seems unrelated to today’s work but somehow feels important.
An hour when nothing productive seems to happen, yet something inside me is slowly becoming clearer.
Not every signal deserves action. And not every empty hour produces insight.
Maybe that is exactly the point.
If I require every hour to produce something measurable, there is no real open space. I have already decided what that hour is allowed to become.
I still believe in planning. I still need discipline. There are many times when the right thing to do is simply sit down and finish what needs to be finished.
But I am beginning to see that there may also be times when efficiency means something different.
Sometimes the important question is not:
How faithfully did I follow today’s plan?
It is:
Did I leave enough room to notice that my direction itself may be changing?
Perhaps some apparently wasted time is not wasted at all.
It may simply be the space in which a quieter signal finally becomes audible..
The Heart of Endurance 