Efficiency aficionados love the idea of squeezing a little bit more out of every hour. Adding just a little bit more efficiency to every day. Getting 1% better. Fine-tuning the habits, stacking, sorting, and refolding them. It becomes an endless cycling of refinement and tweaks, trying to get the perfectly efficient day.
The problem arises if you haven’t developed a clear vision yet. Efficiency can be running faster on a hamster wheel if you haven’t done the hard, thoughtful work of developing a clear vision of where you’re trying to go.
In Andy Stanley’s book Visioneering he describes the impact of a clear vision – with vision have something that you are pursuing, something of significance, and with it come five things:
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Passion, or Emotion – The hope of the vision being fulfilled should yield an emotional response. If it doesn’t, then it’s probably not your vision, it’s someone else’s. A significant vision is exciting and scary. If your vision doesn’t scare you, then it’s probably not big enough, or it’s something you feel that you should do, not want to do.
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Motivation – Small, normally insignificant tasks take on new meaning as they are put into the context of something significant being built. Coffee with a friend might be you surviving a boring afternoon, but if you’re working on a business plan together, it takes on a conspiratorial air. If it’s about fulfilling a vision, then it’s likely to energize you more than your Americano.
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Direction – It is the decision that eliminates so many other decisions. Once you’ve got a clear vision, you begin to voluntarily throw off the things that distract you from that vision. There may be a thousand roads before you, but this sets the heading. It’s often more of a compass than a roadmap.
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Priorities – Once the vision is set, your priorities become clear. You know what needs to take precedence in your calendar, in your thought life, what needs your resources. If you have a fear of missing out, then there is a good chance that you don’t have your vision clarified.
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Purpose – It’s what gets you up in the morning, and what keeps you up late at night. It’s what you’re willing to sacrifice for when no one is watching or reading. You have ownership of your life and your time, but once you’ve realized that there are yours for a purpose, to be brought into alignment with something bigger than yourself, you find that you’re purpose is, and we always find that life really isn’t about us.
What you see is that without a clear vision of what you’re trying to accomplish, building efficiency is futile. Vision is one of the truly big rocks we need to have established in our life before we can pour the sand around it. Efficiency is that sand. How we use our time and energy will be dictated by our vision. Without vision, we perish, as any one decision is as insignificant as any other.