Is that activity doesn’t equate to effectiveness and effectiveness isn’t measured in sheer brute force.
A few years back, the term “crushing it” became meme worthy and I remember pretty vividly the term being used on “30 Rock” and not in a cool way either.
Unfortunately in our always on society, we have not doubled down on working smarter, only appearing to work harder and harder.
When in reality, the results might not justify all the effort or stepping back and taking aim in a different way may be an entirely viable strategy.
The problem with measuring activities all on their own is that you end up with a great deal of mediocrity.
Take a look at the typical sales bullpen, if the number of dials is the most important measure of how much closer you are to making your next sale, all calls are the same.
Or, take the current state of advertising and marketing, where we see that more and more and more of the efforts that advertisers and marketers are spending are on trying to create things that go “viral” or reach the “mass” market.
The only problem with this approach is that no one can guarantee you a “viral” hit. And, as a practical concern, “mass” is over because we see that only a few things really hit “mass” acceptance and most of the things have slid off into niche markets.
Take cable TV.
Take news.
Take sports.
Take blogs.
The problem with only looking at activities is present in almost every industry today too.
In the US, national elections are one of the last areas where you have full on mass attention because everyone votes for the president.
But you see that even in down ballot elections, the consultants try to achieve “mass.” Worrying about “name recognition” or some other vanity metric that is unimportant in the grand scheme of an election where the most important metric is potential voters ID’d and the percentage of those voters you can turn out. Along with the real important metric that, if I’ve ID’d properly, do I have enough to win?
This mentality can find its way into any industry too.
You have a new product to launch, let’s hit everyone. Even though we all know that if you target everyone, you are targeting no one.
Or, when you write something.
If you aren’t writing for a specific audience, you aren’t writing for any audience.
On and on and on.
So, you see, the problem with only measuring activities is that you aren’t ever taking a step back to figure out what you really aught to be looking at.
The real work isn’t in putting in blind effort. Its putting in the effort after you’ve answered the question: “Instead of trying to do everything, what’s the most important thing?”