Forget about making your bed first thing in the morning. There, I've said it - and not just because I'm unenthusiastic about domestic tasks. This also isn’t a denouncement of discipline or diminishing the vast accomplishments of Admiral William H McRaven and his popular speech. Rather, it's a wake-up call to continually fight the organisational inertia towards just doing tasks for the sake of them - and realise how this default thinking can steer us away from the most meaningful and impactful work.
In case you haven't seen it, this video by Admiral McRaven went viral, with the widely quoted opening line: "If you want to change the world...start off by making your bed. If you make your bed in the morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, before encouraging you to do another...and another...and another."
Hardly a contentious point...but far too linear for me. Here's my objection; as we meticulously straighten our sheets and fluff our pillows, are we priming ourselves just to "be busy"?
Does making our beds lead us to believe we've started the day productively, thereby excusing us from reflecting critically on the rest of our to-do list?
My guidance is that effectiveness, not efficiency, drives the greatest results. Each time you make your bed...I highly doubt you've made any progress on the "big" goals in your life. And if making your bed conditions you to go onto more low stakes, low impact "easy" tasks...I think that's a busyness trap.
Efficiency asks "how can I do this task quickly?", while effectiveness asks "am I doing the right tasks?"
Let me give you a low-stakes personal example of how I would choose the right task:
Most of us want to do a little more exercise and improve our health and well-being.
If tomorrow, you wake up and straight away do 5 minutes of "insert your preferred activity here" (yoga, strength work, walking on a treadmill, etc.), BUT as a consequence, forget to make your bed... is that a "bad" start to the day?
Of course, some superheroes optimise and do both the exercise and bed-making...but the rest of us mere mortals get pressed to make daily choices, in seemingly ever increasingly busy lives.
So, personally, I would rather prioritise a proven strategy for health and well-being (aka: true effectiveness) and do 5 minutes of exercise...over a catalogue-worthy bedroom.
I accept you can pick holes in this small trivial example; what's more interesting is if you raise the stakes and scale this out across an organisation. What would happen if we gave our talent permission to stop "making the bed" as a metaphor for any one of the myriads of low-value, compliance-based tasks and procedures that exist in an organisation? How about if we incrementally gave them back time to prioritise and focus on the actions that truly delivered on organisational purpose and objectives, even if it meant things looked a little more 'unmade'?\
It turns out, in the creative and knowledge based fields at least, we would gravitate towards our innate desire for progress. Extensive research on this comes from Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, with "The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work." Amabile and Kramer found that the biggest motivator for employees was indeed the sense of making progress on meaningful work. So what does this look like? It's small, incremental wins and a sense of forward momentum on the primary objective of their work. Moreover, when individuals feel that they are making tangible progress towards meaningful goals, it not only enhances their motivation but also their overall well-being.
Understanding this finding helped shape the first of our Apricot Consulting Change Principles: "Align change with what matters" which advocates making the connection between change activities and the purpose of the organisation, explicitly clear.
Prioritising effectiveness over efficiency means actively creating change initiatives that are meaningful and impactful, not just those that are easy to complete or "look good" to the outside world.
An important sub-category of this approach (arguably, the most important in modern times) is actively choosing what not to do in order to more quickly reach your goals. James Clear of Atomic Habits fame skips the traditional 'to-do' list and asks himself each day: "What should I remove?" All of us who have been senior leaders have gotten in our way, by adding extra things (e.g.: meetings, messaging, reporting) when we should have been subtracting, to reduce the noise and get our teams making progress on what matters.
If making the bed brings you joy (even if that's by avoiding an argument with a significant other) then good for you; I hope when you do, you think of this article and ask yourself "What is the most impactful thing I can do today?". This style of thinking isn't about shirking our daily tasks; it's about being thoughtful and deliberate about the tasks we choose to complete.
I fully agree with McRaven that small actions can change the world. But let's ensure these actions are based on being effective and meaningful.