[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.