Goal. To-Do List. What Is the Difference?

Understanding Goals and to-Do List via Productivity and Efficiency

For personal productivity systems, it’s quite common to have two things: goals and a to-do list. These two mirror two greater notions: productivity and efficiency. Despite the to-do list tools that you use, you won’t avoid these two. So let’s figure them out and figure out the significant difference between your goals and your to-do list.

Productivity and efficiency are often confused, which is understandable since the concepts aren’t exactly straightforward. If instead of productivity, we’ll elaborate on the effectiveness, e.g., effective to-do list, things become even scarier. Effectiveness and efficiency are even closer in the structure of the words, so the confusion is almost inevitable. For this reason, we’ll stick to productivity and efficiency.

These terms are frequently viewed through the lens of production — factories, equipment, and labor come to mind. Imagine Frederick Taylor running around to track progress of the recurring tasks of the employees. Workers staging strikes and halting production, and profits plummeting. You might even picture Japanese lean production specialists perfecting their company’s business processes.

But the topic of labor productivity and efficiency isn’t confined to factories, professional development of software or project management. Any task can be considered productive or unproductive, efficient or inefficient — even reading this article. I’ll use it as an example below.

Let’s look at the definitions. In this blog there already was a definition of the “goal” term from the Cambridge Dictionary:

a purpose, or something that you want to achieve.

Let’s see the “productivity” definition as it mirrors the goal [1]:

the rate at which a person, company, or country does useful work.

If we reword, we can say that productivity is the rate of achieving goals.

Here is what Cambridge Dictionary gives as a to-do list definition [2]:

a list of the tasks that you have to do, or things that you want to do.

Let’s now look at the efficiency. It doesn’t reflect the to-do list that vividly as we saw before for goal and productivity [3]:

the quality of achieving the largest amount of useful work using as little energy, fuel, effort, etc. as possible.

We’ll see their connection later in the article.

So when you complete your goals, you are productive

What About “Effectiveness”?

We already discussed the effectiveness above, but let’s consider it even closer [4]:

the ability to be successful and produce the intended results.

This seems almost synonymous with productivity. For simplicity, we’ll treat it as such here. So, when we discuss productivity, we also consider the effectiveness.

Are Productivity and Efficiency Independent?

At first glance, these concepts might appear independent, but they are deeply interconnected. Productivity cannot exist without efficiency. Without the ability to yield output, there’s no basis for efficiency, which measures how economically that output was achieved.

As soon as productivity comes into play, so do the resources invested in achieving it — thus, efficiency emerges.

What About Goal and Task Management in To-Do List?

These two are more specific and are not that dependent on each other. E.g., there is a pre-flight checklist, and its goal is to ensure no problems during the plane’s take-off. There are very important tasks in it, but it has nothing to do with the to-do list.

To-do list is one special kind of list-based tools. It’s a very fluid checklist, and its goal is to keep the order in your life, to support its quality, to move you towards your desires and dreams. These things come to the preferred state when you complete your personal tasks. The tasks mentioned could be daily tasks to support your routine, one-time tasks to fulfill a particular need or move towards your desire.

To sum up, a to-do list is a task management and time management instrument helping you to track goals and move towards them. Goal setting is crucial before creating a to-do list to ensure you are clear on what you want to achieve. You can use pen and paper to create it, or use the dedicated to-do list app be it Todoist, TickTick, SingularityApp or Google Calendar.

Do to-do lists appear when the goal arises? I doubt it is so. This blog hasn’t yet investigated the history of to-do lists as it did with history of lists of checklists. However, we need writing to create a list, and goals existed before writing appeared.

Understanding Productivity and Efficiency Through Examples

Now that we’ve clarified the definitions, let’s turn to examples. They help to grasp both the concepts and the differences between them. In the very first post on this blog, we used ants as an example. Here are some fresh ones.

No Productivity Means No Efficiency

Last New Year’s Eve, I sent a gift to my grandparents using a courier service. It was late December, and within three days, the service proudly reported that the package had arrived in the destination city. I was impressed by their efficiency, considering the resource crunch during the holiday season. They managed to make the delivery before the due date in less than a week!

However, the seemingly flawless process had a glaring flaw: I had sent the package to a small town named “N,” but it ended up in a large city with the same name. Efficiency? Hardly. While the delivery was swift, it was far from productive as it missed the mark entirely. The courier service definitely needs to act better in keeping track of the goods and improve their tasks prioritization.

The Most Inefficient Machines

Did you know that humanity has been amused for over a century by Rube Goldberg machines in comics, animation, films, and video games? These overly complicated machines achieve simple results through extraordinarily convoluted processes, making them quintessentially inefficient.

Interestingly, these machines usually have very low productivity. They are rarely designed for repeat use, often with a productivity rate of 1. For sure it’s not a guiding light for your personal growth strategy.

Reading Productivity and Efficiency

Earlier, I promised to discuss reading this article in terms of productivity and efficiency. If we measure reading productivity as the number of articles read per hour, it becomes straightforward. By measuring it so we can compare the results of former us with the current results. Or to compete with friends.

This post can be read aloud, silently, or using speed-reading techniques. Each method yields a result, but the numbers vary — 10 articles per hour in one case, 15 in another, and 30 in the last one. Increasing productivity is achieved by improving efficiency. Inefficient subvocalization is replaced by more efficient visual processing.

If you asked, I would say that learning speed-reading should definitely be a vital task. List your highly important ones and add it to there.

We’ve examined productivity from a reader’s perspective, but how is it measured if you’re the author? It could be the number of articles published or something else, like subscriber growth after reading. If 1 subscriber joins for every 100 reads, that defines productivity for attracting loyal readers.

By the way, subscribe! Help this article about productivity and efficiency exemplify both.

Three Types of Work in Lean Production

If we shift to an industrial perspective, things get more complex. In lean production, the work performed in a company is divided into three categories. Let’s use a stool as the product of our imaginary business. It’s easy to imagine its production as a sequence of the actionable steps. The types of actions are:

1. Value-adding actions (e.g., shaping a wooden leg, applying varnish).
2. Waste actions (e.g., correcting defects, prolonged downtimes of completed parts).
3. Necessary but non-value-adding actions (e.g., material accounting, staff administration).

Lean companies aim to systematically eliminate waste. This boosts efficiency and, consequently, productivity. Can one improve without the other? Sometimes, but that’s a topic for one of the later paragraphs.

An Example of Unbelievable Efficiency

The magical сornucopia also known as horn of plenty from Greek folklore is an apt example here. It requires minimal support effort — just a place to store it — but provides immense value instantly. The efficiency metrics are off the charts!

Granted, its size may limit its utility, but are these significant drawbacks? After all, did someone in tales ever try to feed an entire nation using just the horn. Well, maybe we could if we split the goal to feed all people of the country with manageable smaller tasks.

Why mention it? Because even though such results are unrealistic in the real world, an impossible benchmark can sometimes reveal the potential for improvement in reality through radically better resources and time management.

Boosting Productivity and Efficiency

Throughout history, significant boosts in these metrics have often led to transformative changes.

Take this blog, for example. Two years ago, preparing high-quality images in such volumes for a small blog wasn’t even feasible. Now, the process has become far more efficient.

Enhancing Productivity Without Efficiency

Productivity can be increased without improving efficiency. How? Through horizontal scaling. If a factory has one stool production line, adding a second independent line could double productivity at the same efficiency level.

However, the second line may not be entirely independent, introducing challenges like space constraints or insufficient power supply. Could this be predicted? Maybe, but not for the vast range of the potential side effects.

Improving Efficiency

From the examples above, it’s clear that improving efficiency often enhances productivity, though not always. If you have materials for 20 stools, proper time management for speeding up the drying process won’t let you make 25 stools. It will simply allow faster production, meeting the same demand quicker.

Conclusion for Goal, To-Do List, Productivity and Efficiency

Goals are your lighting guide to help you stay motivated and continue daily work. Goal setting is crucial in this process.

To-Do list is a tool to organize your life, to handle one-time events and to highlight the path to your goals. However, it’s not the only instrument. You can use your memory if you are not afraid to forget. It doesn’t work well on scale, though.

Productivity is about results — whether we can deliver them and how much.

Efficiency is about resource economy in achieving those results.

All terms are vital, not just for personal productivity practitioners or business owners. They are tools for improving everyone’s life, which is the focus of this blog.

How are productivity and efficiency related to lists and checklists? Directly. The more results each step delivers, the better its quality. Lists, especially operational definitions, greatly benefit from improvement.

Have you gained clarity about productivity and efficiency? Subscribe to the “So List” blog to discover simple but effective tools like lists and checklists and their practical applications. Already familiar with them? I doubt it — there’s too much hidden potential to uncover.

List of Links

[1] “Productivity” from Cambridge Dictionary
[2] “To-Do List” from Cambridge Dictionary
[3] “Efficiency” from Cambridge Dictionary
[4] “Effectiveness” from Cambridge Dictionary