In a word?... Efficiency

I will start off my new blog with a post about me.  If I had to choose a single word that describes my underlying motivation it would be efficiency.  Even if I don't consciously think about it all the time, it is there guiding my movements and affecting my decisions.  This seems like an easy enough concept to grasp right?  But most people don't comprehend the ways (or to what degree) that one word affects me.

To illustrate the degree to which it affects me I will go back a few years to my college days.  I found the optimal way to keep my campus ID in my pocket so that I could not only get it out quickly, but also know which direction it was facing (so I could swipe it through the card readers at doors) without having to look at it.  Most people ask me why I bothered to worry about a few extra seconds.  I like to compare it to people that are dieting.  They may try to cut a few calories from a meal by not having mayo on a sandwich, or getting water to drink instead of pop.  When you ask them about it, they will tell you that those calories add up.  I say the same thing about seconds.  If I am efficient with my time usage, then maybe I can carve an extra 30 minutes out of a day to get stuff done.  Granted, I am not that hardcore about my time (especially now that I have small children),  but efficiency does continue to affect me to degree that most everyone else would find excessive.

For an example of the way in which efficiency affects me I will turn to my driving habits.  Most people expect driving efficiently to mean that I find the shortest/fastest route to a destination.  But I don't simply stop with that one criteria.  When dealing with places that I drive regularly (to/from work/home), various other factors come into play.  The most significant criteria that other don't expect is finding the correct lane to be in to avoid unnecessary interruptions.  For example, on my way home there is a stretch of road that is a few hundred feet long that I have found to be the best place to change from the left lane to the right lane.  If I change before that location, I run the risk of getting stuck behind people trying to turn right into the gas station that regularly has cheap gas.  If I wait too long after that location, I risk getting stuck behind people trying to turn left across oncoming traffic.  Of course this is all only applies when traffic is heavy (like at the end of the work day).

So you see, for me efficiency means working in ways and at levels that most people don't even consider.  Hopefully this helps you understand me a little better.  So the next time you catch me repeatedly doing a task a specific way (that doesn't immediately make sense) you might begin to understand why.  It's probably due to the influence of my interpretation of efficiency.