Tag: Efficiency

Ready To Go.

Welcome back to the Friday 2 on 1 blog posts where Shackman and I write on the same topic. There was a break for a few weeks while Shackman went off for a reunion and he is now settled and raring to go at it again. So am I.

I am one of those highly disciplined fellows who is always ready to go. There is always a set of washed and ironed clothes in the wardrobe, simply waiting to be worn to go out as are a pair of polished shoes. My chest of drawers contains all the essentials that I need to carry with me when I go out like my wallet with my club /credit and identity cards plus of course enough money to meet any emergencies.

My cell phone is always charged and ready to go without charging for a few hours. I am also usually well fed and will be able to manage without food for a few hours.

Sounds creepy and unnatural? That is because I was a travelling salesman all my life and had a packed suit case ready to take with me on emergency trips. Those years of such living has to leave its imprint on one’s personality what?

I am also a sort of planner. For instance, if I know that I have to go to meet somebody, I will arrange for the gift/s to be ready well before it is time to leave and those packages are kept along with my walking stick so that I do not forget to take them. Any number of such tricks have been ingrained over years and so I can claim to be one who is always Ready To Go.

Do please visit Shackman’s blog to see what he has to say on the subject.

Effectiveness.

Welcome to the Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where twelve of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by me. The ten other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Magpie, Maria SF, ocdwriter, Padmum, Paul, Rohit, The Old Fossil and Will. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!

Effectiveness is defined by The Business Dictionary, as “the degree to which objectives are achieved and the extent to which targeted problems are solved. In contrast to efficiency, effectiveness is determined without reference to costs and, whereas efficiency means “doing the thing right,” effectiveness means “doing the right thing.”

The reason I chose this topic was the strong suspicion that I was being very efficient in my care giving activities but not effective. This kept bugging me and I decided to bare my soul to an amateur psychologist friend, to find out why this was happening.

On analysis it turned out that to be effective in any situation there must be feed back. In other normal activities, the feed back is an ongoing process and one can modify one’s actions to ensure that the outcome is what is desired. In this instance, the lacuna was the absence of any kind of feed back. Positive or negative.

We probed further and came to this epiphany as it were.

There can always be effectiveness or efficiency in relationships but never good or bad relationships.

We concluded that there is either a relationship or there is none. There cannot be a good one or a bad one. People in the so called bad relationships, having opted to continue that, for whatever reason, are simply in an ineffective relationship though all actions within that relationship can be efficient.

AND we decided that such a relationship should be called a Mechanical Relationship.

At this point, I raised the objection that there could be situations where the lack of feedback could be due to an inability due to illness in the care receiver, to provide such feed back. My friend readily accepted this is a valid objection and suggested that we call such a relationship as a spiritual one.

I could not agree more.

It still leaves my original problem unsolved.