[tchaffee]

You are task oriented, while your wife is goal oriented. If there are twenty dishes to wash and you only have time to wash seven, the goal oriented person washes the seven. Goal oriented people actually tend to be better organized and get more things done. All of the time you spend planning doesn't add up to enough savings for it to pay off. Try timing a few things and see for yourself. Loading the dishwasher in a different way might save you one or two seconds total. But you spent more time thinking about it. Just get things done. You'll find you are faster, and you spend less time thinking. Thinking requires effort and energy. Save that for the stuff that really matters.

[projektir]

Such claims are very major and significant, but rarely have strong evidence behind them, and as such I would recommend that they are not made, and that the OP continues to do whatever it is that they find efficient.

[_8j50]

Opinion does not require evidence. He was commenting based on experience.

[jamescostian]

GP wasn't asserting that the original comment wasn't an opinion, GP was asserting that the lack of evidence makes the opinion unnecessary (the question was not "Why ..." it was "How ..." and the question did not ask for any tips).

To better demonstrate why this opinion isn't worth a lot without strong evidence, one can imagine almost the same words, but arguing for the exact opposite side and notice how neither argument is more helpful than the other. For example, consider if the original comment read:

Task oriented people actually tend to be better organized and get more things done. The tunnel vision that goal oriented people have prevents them from performing efficiently enough to meet their goals. Try timing a few things and see for yourself. Not thinking about things might save you one or two seconds total. But you spent more time proceeding with an inefficient plan. Just think a little more. You'll find you are faster, and you spend less time repeating the same motions. Actions require effort and energy. Save that for the stuff that really matters.

[btschaegg]

> The tunnel vision that goal oriented people have prevents them from performing efficiently enough to meet their goals.

Interesting. You basically just described various situations in which I was flabbergasted because some colleagues of mine regularly try to slog manually through very boring, repetitive tasks (with much sighing and moaning, of course). I find it rather strange to have to point out possible automation (even for one-off tasks) in an IT firm.

That said, being the procrastinating type, some tasks just have to get done. The dishes don't do themselves, no matter how much you organize them :-)

[tchaffee]

I'm glad you mentioned procrastination. That's a key characteristic of task oriented people. The biggest benefit I got from observing goal oriented vs. task oriented people was to stop procrastinating (in the name of efficiency) and to just get things done. Things like the dishes. And once I understood there's not going to be a breakthrough in efficiency in picking up socks around the house, I also started moving faster at those things so I could get back to the fun stuff like thinking about how to make stuff efficient. Stuff that really can be made more efficient.

[tchaffee]

Your advice would be just as good as the advice I gave. Because it contains the most important part of my advice:

"Try timing a few things and see for yourself."

The point is that some things in life deserve to be looked at for efficiency improvements, and some things should just get done. Understanding the difference between the two takes some observation. And by observing people who are organized and efficient as opposed to people who are disorganized and procrastinate in the framework of goal oriented vs. task oriented I think it will become quickly obvious to the OP where the difference is.

Making that shift from task oriented to goal oriented hugely improved my own life. I was very focused on collecting long lists of tasks and then trying to optimize them. While I was determining the optimal route for collecting building supplies, dropping off the laundry, doing my grocery shopping, optimizing the cooking process, etc., my friends had already built the pool deck and were on the way to the supermarket... YMMV.

> why this opinion isn't worth a lot without strong evidence

Do you really need strong evidence for something that you can quickly and easily try yourself at home? If I suggest an improvement to your bike riding technique you want a scholarly study or you'll just give it a go?

[jamescostian]

>> why this opinion isn't worth a lot without strong evidence

> Do you really need strong evidence for something that you can quickly and easily try yourself at home? If I suggest an improvement to your bike riding technique you want a scholarly study or you'll just give it a go?

I'm not saying you lack evidence for "try timing a few things", I'm saying you lack evidence for "Goal oriented people actually tend to be better organized and get more things done"

[_8j50]

That would be a valid opinion too. It is a biased subjective perspective based on experience. A rational reader should confirm this opinion first hand before accepting it as fact.

To me,it's as if someone recommended a restaurant for the taste of food or a workout routine for it's efficiency because of their experience,they were stating their experience,they did not need to provide verifiable evidence.

[jamescostian]

I should have been clearer, I was referring to the part that said "Goal oriented people actually tend to be better organized and get more things done"

That's less like "I like this one food or this one workout routine" and more like "People who do this workout routine tend to be stronger and better looking than people who use another one", or "People who use [some operating system or programming language] tend to be better organized and get more things done"

[projektir]

jamescostian has addressed the point well enough, but to add more to it, there are many ways to state an opinion, but tchaffee chose a very authoritative one, and when you claim something as true with neither evidence nor a good mechanism exploration, I believe you should be called out on it, because way too many claims like this are being made these days and people often end up believing them because they don't stop and think about how poorly the claims are actually supported.

[tchaffee]

I suggested he time things himself. Why isn't that a good enough mechanism of exploration?

[tchaffee]

How much effort would it take you to pay attention to whether or not you are goal or task oriented and to time a few things to see if you are being too focused on efficiency when you could just be getting things done?

If you posted about how you approached flying a drone and someone noticed something they thought could use improvement, would you ask for a source? Or just give it a try if their advice sounded reasonable?

Let's not get so enthusiastic about asking for sources and evidence that we insist on sources for things which we could quickly and cheaply experiment with on our own and find out for ourselves if the advice has any merit.