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Giorgio Cantarini and Roberto Benigni

Giorgio Cantarini and Roberto Benigni

He showed up for his audition alone, without his mother, wearing an enormous overcoat that seemed to swallow his tiny body. Roberto Benigni looked at the little boy and immediately thought he looked like a clown. What he didn’t know was that this child was about to take on one of the most important roles in his film.

It was 1996, and Roberto Benigni, Italy’s beloved comedian, was trying to do something almost everyone around him considered impossible. He wanted to make a movie set inside a Nazi concentration camp. Not a documentary and not a horror film, but a story about a father’s love so powerful that it could create a world of wonder for his child inside one of the darkest places on earth.

His friends told him to give up. He was known as a comedian, not someone who made historical dramas. He wasn’t even Jewish, so some people questioned what gave him the right to tell such a story.

But Benigni knew exactly where the idea had come from, and it wasn’t arrogance. It came from his father.

Luigi Benigni had spent two years in a Nazi labor camp during World War II. When Roberto was a child, his father would sit down with the family at night and tell them about what he had experienced. But Luigi did not describe it exactly as it had happened. He didn’t want to frighten his children. Instead, he told the stories the way a father might explain something terrible to someone he loved, finding the dark humor, the absurd moments, and the small pieces of humanity that somehow survived the horror. He turned something frightening into a story his children could bear to hear.

As Roberto grew older, he began to understand what his father had given him. He realized that this was the film he wanted to make.

He also discovered the story of Rubino Romeo Salmonì, an Italian Jew who had been deported to Auschwitz, survived, and later wrote a memoir that contained elements of bitter comedy. Salmonì had experienced something almost impossible to describe, yet he still chose to look at parts of it through irony. Not because he wanted to minimize what had happened, but because humor was one of the ways he managed to remain human in the middle of it.

Benigni was determined not to get the story wrong. He sent drafts of his screenplay to Jewish scholars and Holocaust historians in Milan. He also consulted the Grand Rabbi of Rome. He knew the subject was too serious to approach carelessly.

The film became *La Vita è Bella*, or *Life Is Beautiful*. It tells the story of Guido, a warm and endlessly imaginative Jewish Italian man who falls in love, builds a family, and eventually watches the Nazis come for the people he loves. Inside the concentration camp, separated from his wife, Guido makes a desperate decision. He tells his young son that everything happening around them is actually an elaborate competition. Points can be earned by following the rules, staying quiet, hiding, not crying for food, and never asking for his mother. The grand prize, Guido insists, is a real American tank.

The little boy believes every word.

And that meant the child playing him had to believe it too. Not pretend to believe it, but truly believe it with the complete trust of a five-year-old who has no reason to doubt his father.

That became one of the biggest challenges Benigni faced.

His solution was remarkably simple. He never told Giorgio Cantarini what the movie was really about.

Giorgio was only five years old and couldn’t read yet, so he learned his lines by listening to them being repeated. At one point, he asked what the word “Jewish” meant because he had never heard it before. Benigni gently redirected the conversation. On set, he played games with Giorgio between takes, kept him relaxed, and made him laugh. Benigni later remembered that sometimes Giorgio would arrive in a bad mood, just like any child can, and his job in those moments was simply to make the boy feel safe enough to play.

That is why the fear on Giorgio’s face in some scenes was real. So was the excitement and happiness. The affection he showed toward the man playing his father was not something he had to manufacture. It was simply the natural trust of a five-year-old who believed the person beside him could turn anything into an adventure.

The audience could feel that honesty because it was genuine.

*Life Is Beautiful* was released in Italy in December 1997 and reached international audiences in 1998. The response was immediate and deeply divided. Some Holocaust survivors wept in theaters. Critics debated whether comedy had any place in such a terrible part of history. Some considered the film dishonest, while others believed it captured something deeply truthful, the idea that when circumstances become unbearable, love can create its own kind of fiction, and sometimes that fiction becomes an act of courage.

Then came the 71st Academy Awards in 1999.

When Roberto Benigni’s name was announced for Best Actor, he didn’t simply walk to the stage. He climbed over the backs of the seats in front of him, scrambling across the theater as the audience erupted in laughter and applause. He finally reached the podium breathless and overwhelmed.

That night, *Life Is Beautiful* won three Oscars: Best Actor, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Original Score. Benigni became the first person to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for a performance delivered entirely in a language other than English. It remains the only time it has happened.

Three years later, Giorgio Cantarini appeared in *Gladiator*, playing Russell Crowe’s son. He was eight years old and already had an Oscar-winning movie on his résumé from before he was old enough to read.

In later interviews, Giorgio has remembered the warmth of those days on the set. He remembered the man playing his father always making sure he was comfortable and always finding a way to make him smile.

He didn’t understand what they were really making. And that was exactly the point.

A father, both on screen and behind the scenes, had protected the child from the darkness surrounding the story. Giorgio saw only the game. He saw the adventure. He saw a father who wanted to keep him safe.

He never had to see the horror.

*Life Is Beautiful.* Roberto Benigni spent his career believing in those words. And for one extraordinary film, he found a five-year-old boy who believed them too.

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The Victory Garden

(Tom: I do not endorse the advertiser who posted the story – I have no data on them other than one person’s comment that the seeds come from China and another that they are a reported scam and I did not receive an answer to my email to them – but I do endorse the principle espoused!

Here is my attempt to help you succeed at this endeavour:
Cultivating Life: Growing Food Sustainably
https://www.seedtotable.com.au )

My mum kept a Dig for Victory garden through the war. She kept it going for sixty years after. And what she told me when I was seven years old is the reason I’m writing this right now.

I asked her why she still grew so much food when the supermarket was right down the road. She didn’t look up. She kept her hands in the dirt. And then she said something that didn’t make sense to me until I was standing in an empty supermarket aisle fifty years later.

She said, “Because once you’ve seen the shelves go empty, love, you don’t ever quite trust them to be full again.”

I was seven. I didn’t understand. The supermarket was always full. That was like telling me the sky might turn green.

But she knew something I didn’t. Something that took me thirty four years of teaching Australian history to fully understand. And something that is about to matter to you more than almost anything else you’ll read this week.

Here’s what she knew.

The food system in this country has broken three times in a little over a hundred years. And every single time, the families who had food growing before the shelves became a problem were in a very different position from the families trying to start after.

Not after. Before.

The first time was 1917. World War One. Australia relied heavily on imported garden seed, and when war tore the old supply routes apart, seed became harder to get and food became more expensive. Families started looking at the patch of dirt behind the house differently.

The second time was 1942. World War Two. Food shortages were hitting the Australian home front. Farm labour was short. Drought was biting. Imported seed stock and fertiliser were in short supply. Tea, sugar, butter and meat were rationed. Prime Minister John Curtin launched Dig for Victory and urged Australian families to grow their own vegetables. Backyards. Front yards. Community plots. Whatever useful ground they had.

My mum did exactly that. 2020

She grew tomatoes, beans, peas, carrots, pumpkin and greens. And when the season finished, she didn’t pull everything out and start from zero the next year. She saved seed from her best plants, dried it, stored it, and planted it again when the season came around.

Same tomato. Same quality. Same taste. Year after year. Decade after decade. One seed line. A lifetime of gardens.

Both times, growing food at home and maintaining access to seed suddenly mattered a lot more than people had expected.

Then came the third time.

And this is where it starts to affect you directly.

Supermarket shelves went empty. Not in a history book. In your supermarket. The one you drive to every week. Rice and pasta disappearing. Meat shelves stripped. Limits on ordinary groceries. People looking at each other with that look, the one that says something is wrong and nobody knows exactly how long it will last.

And this time there was no Dig for Victory campaign. No national planting guide landing in Australian homes. No seed programme. No system being handed to ordinary families.

Millions of Australians had the same thought at roughly the same time.

I need to grow some of my own food.

Then they went looking for seeds.

And they couldn’t get them.

Nurseries were stripped. Vegetable seedlings disappeared. Australians who had never grown food before suddenly wanted to start, and seed suppliers were overwhelmed. Some stopped taking new orders. Others sold through stock faster than they could replace it.

The seeds were disappearing before most people had even worked out what they wanted to plant.

Now here’s the part that should make your stomach drop.

The same pattern is forming again.

Right now. While you’re reading this.

I started reading what our own Government is saying about the next few years, and I wish I hadn’t recognised the language.

Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy describes our strategic circumstances as dangerous and unpredictable. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being directed into defence capability, national resilience and Australian self reliance. Missiles are being manufactured here. Domestic rocket motor production is being built. New manufacturing capacity is being created because the Government itself says Australia needs to be less vulnerable when conflict or global disruption breaks the supply chains we depend on.

You don’t need to be a defence expert to understand what that means.

The people whose job is to plan for disruption are planning for disruption.

And you are no more prepared today than you were in March of 2020.

Be honest with yourself about that. Because what I’m about to tell you next makes it even worse.

Even if you went out tomorrow and bought seeds, even if you decided right now that you were going to start a garden and take control of more of your own food, the seeds they’re selling you at the shop may not do what you think they’ll do.

This is the part that made me angry. And I taught history for thirty four years, so I don’t get angry easily.

But this made me angry.

And it should make you angry too.

The seeds my mum planted in her wartime garden could reproduce. She’d plant tomatoes, save the seeds from her best fruit, dry them, store them in a jar, and plant them again the next season. Same tomato. Same quality. Same taste. Year after year. Decade after decade.

That was the whole point.

Not going back to the shop every spring and buying the garden again.

Saving what you grew and planting it again.

The seeds on the rack at your hardware store right now are different.

Most of them are hybrids. They grow one season. One harvest. But save those seeds and plant them the following year and the second generation can come back stunted, weak, inconsistent, completely different from the parent plant, or sometimes barely useful at all.

Scientists call it F2 breakdown.

And here’s what you need to understand.

That’s not a defect. That’s the design.

A seed that doesn’t reproduce true is a seed you have to buy again. Every spring. Every year. Another packet. Another charge. Another season where you’re completely dependent on whatever happens to be sitting on the rack when you need it.

They turned your garden into a subscription.

And you didn’t even know it was happening.

Four companies now control more than 60 percent of the world’s seed supply. Every one sells hybrids. Every one profits when growers come back for more seed the following season.

A seed that comes back is a customer that doesn’t.

Meanwhile, there is a Global Seed Vault built inside an Arctic mountain near the North Pole, designed to protect the world’s crop diversity against catastrophic loss.

Think about that for a second.

The world considers seed diversity important enough to protect inside a frozen mountain.

Yet most ordinary families don’t have a single season of saved seed sitting in a jar.

Let me be very clear about where that leaves you right now.

Australia still depends on overseas supply chains for things we use every day, including agricultural inputs and large quantities of vegetable seed. Our own Government is openly spending hundreds of billions strengthening Australian self reliance because it knows global disruption can travel through a supply chain and end up in an ordinary Australian household.

If demand surges the way it did in 2020, you cannot magically create a mature garden that morning.

You either have seed.

Or you’re trying to buy it with everybody else.

My great grandmother never had that problem. My mum never had that problem.

But most of us do.

Not because we’re less capable than they were.

Because they changed what was on the shelf while nobody was paying attention.

My mum understood this sixty years ago. She saved seeds her entire life because she knew one thing most people alive today have forgotten.

A woman with seed in a jar has a future no matter what happens next.

A woman without one is standing in an empty aisle hoping someone restocks the shelf before her family needs what isn’t there.

Which one are you right now?

Here’s the truth I spent thirty four years teaching in classrooms, then watched become real for my own generation in 2020.

By the time you see the crisis on your television, it is too late to start planting for that crisis.

The families with food already growing are the families who started before the shelves went empty.

Not after. Before.

That is not an opinion.

That is the lesson history keeps repeating.

If I’m wrong about what I’m seeing right now, if this pattern breaks and the shelves stay full, you lose nothing. You have a beautiful garden and tomatoes that taste like real food. You learn how to save seed. You start a seed line you can keep building on season after season.

If I’m right, you’ll be the family with seed already in your hands while everybody else is standing in an empty aisle wondering what happened.

I would rather be the woman with the jars.

P.S. My mum kept her wartime garden for sixty years because once she had seen empty shelves, she never completely trusted them to stay full again.

She was right.

2020 proved it.

And the thing she understood that took me fifty years to understand is this:

Buying seeds isn’t the same as owning a repeatable seed supply.

47,000+ families already have theirs.

P.P.S. If you’re still reading this, remember what happened last time.

The shelves emptied. Australians rushed to grow. Seed suppliers were overwhelmed.

There won’t be a fourth warning. Just a morning when it matters whether you started before you needed to.

Don’t be the family in the empty aisle!

MY MUM WAS RIGHT!

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Free Hormone Booklets

Free Hormone Booklets

Several years ago a naturapath suggested my late wife get some bioidentical hormone creams. The supplier is not making some booklets available that may help women suffering hormone loss. Thought I’d share the link with you. Feel free to pass it on.

“Hormone decline is inevitable and the physical, emotional and mental effects of that decline can be horrible. Did you know there are actually 115 symptoms of hormone decline? You’re probably having some of th em and have no idea they’re hormone related.

I’ve been consulting women on how to balance their hormones for 25 years. To help with that, I’ve written 6 booklets that tell the TRUTH about Hormone Replacement Therapy and how you can replace your hormones all by yourself. Fill in your contact info below to receive the first of those 6 FREE booklets.”

Apply here: https://mailchi.mp/bonvida.biz/c9a4z0lt9l

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Prostate Data

I saw an ad for a prostate remedy, checked the web site and ran it past ChatGPT. After a bit of to and fro the summary of what helps was:

So if we are looking for a “prostate supplement” hierarchy…

I wouldn’t rank them, because the evidence isn’t sufficiently comparable to justify saying one is the best. But I’d divide them like this:

Most worth investigating further

Beta-sitosterol
Pygeum africanum
Standardised pumpkin-seed extract

Interesting but evidence presently weaker

Crinum latifolium
Lycopene
Other multi-herb formulations

Evidence generally disappointing

Ordinary saw palmetto

And I’d add one very important caveat: none of these should be presented as preventing prostate cancer or as a substitute for investigation of persistent urinary symptoms. The research above is predominantly about BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia) and LUTS (lower urinary tract symptoms).

Populations with historically low prostate-cancer incidence tend to have dietary patterns based more heavily on plant foods, pulses and traditional staples, with relatively less meat and highly processed food. Some also consume substantial fish or soy, but neither appears necessary to produce a low-incidence population.

And there’s a second, equally important conclusion:

The enormous differences in recorded prostate-cancer incidence between countries cannot be explained by diet alone. Screening, diagnosis, age, genetics, healthcare access and body composition are major confounders.

The full chat: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab70950-5b10-83ec-a37a-49a8683e24b5

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Why Your Body Suddenly Ages Faster After 60 (Doctors Rarely Explain This)

Staying Younger Longer

For a lot of people, aging doesn’t happen at a steady pace — it stays gradual for years, then noticeably speeds up during a specific window later in life. In this video, we break down what’s actually happening inside your cells during that shift, from cellular senescence to mitochondrial decline, and the 5 research-backed habits genuinely associated with slower biological aging.

What you’ll learn:

• The difference between your chronological age and your biological age
• The 4 biological processes that compound during this window
• Why “inflammaging” happens and what drives it
• 5 lifestyle factors linked to measurably slower biological aging
• What’s actually worth bringing to your doctor

Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14btYVULcpE

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Do you know why doctors and nurses remained silent about all the clots, strokes, etc. after the COVID shot rollout?

Dr In Hospital Corridor

Answer: Because they didn’t want to lose their job. And I wish I was kidding about that.
Steve Kirsch

If you remain silent about what you observe, you get to keep your job. That’s how the medical system works. Do not challenge the “medical consensus.” It is a sacred cow.

Executive summary

After the COVID shots rolled out, critical care units of hospitals were seeing massive spikes in clots and strokes.

Why didn’t they speak up?

Because they didn’t want to lose their job (or their medical license).

I wish I was kidding about this, but I’m not.

I heard this directly from the nursing staff at a large hospital I was just at.

This is why people don’t trust doctors. It’s not the fault of “misinformation spreaders.” It’s because doctors aren’t allowed to tell us the truth.

Finish reading: https://open.substack.com/pub/stevekirsch/p/do-you-know-why-doctors-and-nurses

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The autism onset chart produced by Dr. Bernard Rimland that nobody can explain

Autism Onset Chart

Whoa! I found the autism onset chart produced by Dr. Bernard Rimland that nobody can explain. Dr. Bernard Rimland, an autism expert who founded the Autism Research Institute, firmly believed vaccines cause autism. I located his original testimony and the graph of the data he cited in Congress.
Steve Kirsch

The officials of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Centers for Disease Control, and other medical organizations claim that since autism typically starts at about 18 months, when the MMR shot “coincidentally”given, the parents are mistaken in their belief that the MMR caused their child’s autism. To examine this issue, Riniland analyzed the data collected by the Autism Research Institute from many thousands of parents of autistic children since the 1960s. The data reveal that the onset of autism at 18 months is a recent development. Parent reports show that through the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s children autistic from birth outnumbered by 2 to 1 those with onset at 18 months. Starting in the early-1980s, when the MMR triple vaccine was introduced, the picture has reversed: now the “onset at 18 months” children outnumber the “onset at birth” children by 2 to 1.

Executive summary
Dr. Bernard Rimland studied autism for over 44 years, including about 35 years collecting parent reports. He is the founder of the Autism Research Institute (ARI).

He testified in Congress on April 6, 2000.

You can find his full testimony here starting on page 337 including the chart on the shift of the onset age post MMR vaccine.

In this article, I will summarize his key points:

Vaccines cause autism

Authors of papers disputing this will not show their data. They ignored all data requests.

There was a shift in parent-observed onset age from birth to 18 months that happened post-MMR vaccine introduction. It flipped from 2:1 (birth onset:18 mo onset) to 1:2 which is dramatic. Nobody has ever explained it including the current ARI which is now pro-vaccine!

Starting in 1964, parents started telling Rimland their children were normal until getting a DPT shot, a “triple vaccine.” So in 1967, he started systematically collecting data on the child’s response to the DPT shot.

More recently, before his testimony, he was inundated with parents reporting their child was normal until receiving the MMR, another triple vaccine.

You can see the chart Rimland referenced in his testimony above.

You can also watch the full testimony: Dr. Bernard Rimland, Dr. Michael Goldberg & Dr. Mary Megson – Autism & Childhood Vaccines – April 2000.

Key points

These are the four myths he dispells:

Vaccines are safe

No link between MMR and autism. And Taylor refused to supply his data for re-analysis!

Autism is primarily genetic.

Autism “naturally” occurs at 18 months

Key statement:
As a parent and as a full-time professional researcher, I am bitterly disappointed with the medical establishment’s dismal record with regard to autism over the past 60 years. The medical schools, as well as the governmental agencies, have consistently supported outmoded, unproven and even disproven theories from the very beginning, and have actively opposed the most promising approaches for the treatment of autism.

Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on non-productive lines of research, while virtually no money at all has been given to research on the methods of alternative medicine, which are far more promising in terms of both safety and. efficacy.

https://open.substack.com/pub/stevekirsch/p/whoa-i-found-the-autism-onset-chart

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Effective Time Management

 

Time management is a bit of misnomer as you don’t actually manage time, after all, there are 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour and 24 hours in a day for all of us, no matter our management skills.

And once you spend those 24 hours in a given day they are irrecoverable. You cannot get them back or reassign their use.

We can’t actually manage time as such.

So why do some people get more done than others in the same time?

Apparently the single most powerful time-managemnt habit is treating time as non-negotiable and what you do with it as the variable.

The key being how you manage yourself, your use of time or the tasks on which you put your effort and attention.

This redefinition of what we are trying to accomplish when we wish for ‘better time management skills’ opens the door to more successful management.

We need to focus on what we do with our time to get more things done, more important things done or a better work/life balance.

The Difference Between Effective And Efficient
Effectiveness is about getting the right result.

Efficiency is about getting that result with a minimal waste of resources.

The dictionary defines efficiency as acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort.

And it defines effectiveness as having the intended or expected effect. Getting the result you wanted.

So to be effective or efficient requires you know what the result is you are aiming to produce. Let’s call this result a ‘product’, be that physical item like making a meal or a service deliverable like a mobile phone service or medical diagnosis.

Therefore efficiency is getting the desired product expending as few resources as possible.

You can fail to attain your goal, despite being very efficient, by not getting products that forward your progress towards your overall goal.

You can fail by being effective without being efficient over too long a time frame to be successful.

Ideally each product you obtain should forward your progress towards some overall goal.

If it does not, you can be the most efficient person in the world and still fail to reach your goal.

So every task you undertake in an area should be aligned to forward your progress towards your goal for that area.

And even better, arrange your tasks in the priority of doing first those things that will most rapidly advance your forward progress.

To simplify it:
Effectiveness = doing the right things.
Efficiency = doing things right.

Effectiveness without efficiency means you reach the desired result, but waste resources getting there.

Efficiency without effectiveness means you perform the wrong task extremely well.

The goal of this article is to give you the tools and techniques to transform your life to closer to the one you will really enjoy!

Efficiency Can Make Ineffectiveness Worse
If only your time is involved it makes no difference whether you inefficiently do one ineffective thing an hour or efficiently do ten ineffective things in the same hour.

But if resources other than your time are used, being more efficient at doing ineffective things is actually more wasteful than doing them inefficiently! The increased efficiency compounds the loss of the non-time resources.

Efficiency Is Not A ‘Set And Forget’ Activity
I am always looking for ways to accomplish a high standard product as efficiently as possible. Sometimes I even shame myself when I come up with a better technique after doing something many, many times.

As a for instance, for nearly two decades I have measured ingredients into multiple mixing bowls for different batches of my health products.

When I started, I would measure the amount required into a smaller bowl on a set of scales them tip that into each large mixing bowl.

After a while I bought multiple sets of scales, set each mixing bowl on its own set of scales then measured the quantity of each ingredient directly into each mixing bowl.

Saved the time of emptying the small quantity into each bowl. Sometimes the amount I emptied from a spoon would be more than the exact required so I would have to, if possible, fetch it out.

Then one day I set several mixing bowls out on the table with one set of scales in front and put the first ingredient packet or tub on the scales, tared the scales them spooned the amount I wanted to put in the first mix measured as a minus from zero on the scales.

This operating basis has the advantages of:
– Only having to set up one set of scales – saves time and the capital cost of scales.
– Only ever spooning out the exact ingredient amount. If I extract out too much onto the spoon it is easier to just jiggle the spoon to return some to the bag.
– No taking a large spoonful, sprinkling into the mixing bowl until the exact amount is reached then returning the unused portion to the bag or tub.
– No overage making it into the mixing bowl and no time wasted retrieving it.
– Saves time cleaning only one set of scales at the end of the day.

So don’t be mistaken that just because you or somebody else has been doing something for years or decades that a faster way cannot be found that does not diminish the quality of the product and in some cases even improve it.

Doing Work Once
One of the simplest and easiest rules to say and which the vast majority of people violate most heinously in the digital realm is, “Only do a job once.”

The most egregious violation of this is reading emails. How many times have you opened an email, read it, decided to come back to it later and reread it? Instantly your workload just doubled. You just did the same work – read an email – twice. For zero increased productivity.

This is an example of why efficiency is never a set-and-forget activity – the best systems always look for smarter ways to do the same job once, perfectly, every time.

Discipline yourself to set a specific time to go through your emails and rigorously apply the data in the section below called The Four ‘D’s.

I would love it if you could, before you start this practice, run a stop watch on your email time for a week to document the amount of time you spend on emails.

Then, while rigorously applying what you have learned from this article, run the same stop watch on your email time for the next week.

If you do this I’d love you to drop me a line with your productivity gain.

Trade-offs
We don’t live in a perfect world and often a tradeoff must be made between quality and efficiency.

Hand-made goods are an extreme example. Some people are prepared to pay far more for custom-built furniture, original artwork, unique dresses etc. By all means perform that work efficiently but originality and quality are far more important.

Then there is having to get 5 tasks done in the time it would normally take you to do 4.

You may have heard the maxim that applies to software development.
1. You can choose to have the finished product contain all the features you want.
2. You can choose the have the software finished on time.
3. You can choose to have the product come in under budget.

But you can only have two of the three.

If you want the software to contain all the features and be delivered on due date, forget about budget.

If cost and features are chosen, forget about target dates.

If cost and budget are the priorities you need to tightly prioritise your features as you will not get all of them.

Opportunity Cost
The cost of undertaking a task is not only the resources it consumes. The cost is also the lost opportunity to use those resources for something more valuable.

But if that same hour were expended in something that yielded $500 of gain towards the organisational goal then the opportunity cost is $500, far more than the $50 of wasted time.

The opportunity cost, in this example, $500, of inefficiency is usually higher than the cost, again, in this example, $50, of the wasted resource.

So that allocation of your time to the low-value task could have been used for something that would have made you $500 richer – in money, health, family time or career progress.

Standards Matter
Some people can misunderstand efficiency as “do everything as quickly as possible”.

Efficiency does not mean doing something as cheaply, quickly or easily as possible regardless of quality.

It means achieving the product to the required standard with no deferment of work to a later time. It is NEVER more efficient to scrimp on effort to get the stated quality. If only due to double handling, having to pick up the article or open the file again.

I have a sign over my desk that say, “There is never enough time to do it right but there is always time to do it again.”

Shortcuts that not only save time but also reduce the quality of the product often result in that work needing to be redone. This does not just result in the time to redo the work to the proper standard but also the opportunity cost of that time and potentially financial or reputational lossses or damage from the sub-standard product.

When Efficiency Becomes the Bottleneck
Efficiency is awesome… …until it isn’t.

There comes a point when pushing to make something more efficient actually hurts the result.

When you’re already doing a task 95% perfectly, any extra efficiency push (extra shortcuts, extra speed) can create rework or quality loss, introduce errors, fatigue or create new bottlenecks elsewhere.

The rule of thumb: If you’re already hitting the required standard with no double-handling, stop. Efficiency only pays off up to the point where the product still meets the standard with minimal wasted effort. Beyond that, effectiveness (getting the right result) takes over again.

Real-world examples from recent sources include:

Building projects (2026 analysis): “Faster building demands better planning” – efficiency gains without corresponding quality checks create long-term failures.

Business operations (McKinsey, HBR): Overly aggressive efficiency pushes can turn into “bottleneck bosses” or operational drag.

Personal productivity: If you’re already batching emails perfectly, adding another layer of rules just increases mental load.

Quality Control Step
In my experience, delivering a product to a specified standard requires an inspection step frequently enough to warrant incorporating routine inspection as a standard practice.

This was brought home to me in software development. If I was conceited enough to think that code should work just ‘cos I wrote it and it looked good, I was severely humbled on testing it.

Same reality adjustment when painting a balustrade over a staircase. I could think I had painted the far side of the balustrade verticals reasonably completely until I stood up and looked over the top to see all the places I had missed.

Effectiveness therefore requires periodically asking:
“Did the product actually produce the result I expected?”

Testing and Piloting New Ideas
Sometimes you will want to try a new idea. Could be a new form of advertising, a new way of doing something, a new sales pitch, whatever.

Once of the best ideas I picked up from a very successful marketer was the idea of failure as being a necessary stepping stone to success.

The key was to manage testing and pilot projects, in fact you could apply this to anything new, tightly and rigorously with the intention to ‘fail small and fail fast’ so as to waste as little as possible learning if that idea worked or not.

Much better to learn the idea is a flop in a day with $100 spent than $1,000 in 10 days.

This is an excellent reason to keep score on the existing so it can be compared to the new.

How many hours does it take to produce 100 widgets under the old system versus the new?

How many leads and sales from $100 spent in the old medium compared to the new one?

Attention Management
Studies on cognitive load confirm people are far more efficient when they stay in the same mental “state” instead of jumping between topics.

When you switch contexts, on average you lose 23 minutes of productive time. That is substantial, especially when you add it up over multiple times a day.

I first heard this in the mid 1990s from a software developer who told me he banned mobile phones from the programming room as it took a programmer 30 minutes to get back in the groove after a call.

At the time I shook my head and wondered why it took others so long to get back in the groove. Obviously it is one of the things at which I am good. Or just don’t notice the drop. I like to think the former. LOL.

You can factor this knowledge into your operating basis a couple of different ways.

One is batching the same tasks or similar tasks requiring the same mindset, covered in detail below.

Another is learning to manage your attention, as you are not always in control of what interrupts your day.

Think of it as being similar to driving a manual gear shift car. When you first start an activity you need to ramp up the mental framework you adopt and apply for that task. So, like going through the gears, you orient yourself and ramp up to the point you are operating at high speed.

While driving, when you then encounter a hill you know you need to shift down a gear in order to take the hill.

When at your desk, if an interruption necessitates a mindshift, take a hot second to recognise that, put a placeholder in your mental framework and deliberately shift mental gears.

Making a deliberate practice of mentally shifting gears puts you more at cause over your mental framework instead of being the effect of another person’s interruption.

If you want to get really good at this you can drill doing this verbally with a collegue, coach or spouse.

Batching
Batching (grouping similar products or tasks)is one of the highest-ROI productivity tools because it dramatically cuts attention residue (the mental “tax” of switching contexts) and context-switching costs so you only pay the setup cost once.

Schedule fixed blocks for emails, meetings or other tasks of similar nature instead of reacting to every ping.

Customer support teams who batch inbound calls/emails into 30–60 minute blocks report 20–30% fewer interruptions and higher resolution rates.

Knowledge workers (designers, writers, analysts): Batch research into morning “deep work” blocks, then content creation in afternoon blocks. The 2026 Daybook guide gives a simple 5-step habit to build it:
(1) pick 2–3 similar tasks,
(2) schedule a dedicated block,
(3) silence notifications,
(4) start with the most complex first,
(5) end with a 5-minute reset.

TASK SELECTION BASED ON PRIORITIES

Establish your Basic Purpose in Life
In my mind, establishing your basic purpose in life is the best starting point for any effort to improve yourself or your life, purely because being on your basic purpose is more motivating, more likely to be productive and fulfilling than almost anything else. Here is a link to some techniques I have learned and documented on how to find yours:

How To Work Out Your Basic Purpose In Life:
https://www.tomgrimshaw.com/tomsblog/?p=37862

Set Some Goals
First and foremost is having clearly defined, written goals. It is hard to overestimate the value of this one.

I once heard a lecture on the question, “Is the future cause and the present effect or is the present cause and the future effect?”

Do we think about eating tomorrow (cause) so we work today (effect) to bring that about or do we eat tomorrow (effect) as a result of having worked today (cause)?

Which one is cause?

Well as a hypothesis, let’s take the view that the future is cause. We list every result we want to bring about in the future. Then we work out what action we need to perform in the present to bring about that future result.

Now let’s come out of the philosophical and bring it back to directly helping you get what you want out of life. What future do you want to create?

Some questions to help in this task are:
“Where do I want to be a year from now?”
“Where do I want to be in five years time?”
“Where do I want to be in ten years time?”
“Where do I want to be at retirement?”

Ask these about different areas of your life relevant to you:
Awareness and attitude
Body fitness
Health level
Family – Relationship with your significant other, children, parents and siblings, wider family
Financial
Career
Colleagues
Professional Associations
Social/sports groups
Community
Pets
Possessions – House, furniture, car
Environment
Spiritual

Doing that as a first step ensures you are in a position to evaluate any action against the criteria of whether or not it moves you forward to your goal.

It enables you to operate on the solid principal of ‘Effective First. Efficient Second.’

A note of caution:
Don’t get too hung up on needing to have everything perfect or thinking if you write it here it holds good for all eternity. Just get something on paper to start with and be prepared to refine, modify or completely replace it later.

While there is some old advice to, “Set your goals in concrete and your plans in sand.” it is also true that the first time you do anything it is very rarely going to be your best attempt.

Setting the goal is a first step in creating a detailed system of managing your activity, a system that has the following in alignment:
– A plan
– Programs
– Projects
– Targets
– Statistics
– A valuable final product for the overall activity

If you would like to learn how to create such a system to speed your progress, drop me a line and I will refer you to a free course that teaches it.

Planned Tasks, Normal Traffic and Abnormal Traffic
In any job there are three categories of task that require your attention.

The first category is those tagets laid down in advance which forward the strategic plan dring toward the overall goal for the activity.

The second is the normal traffic (people and particles) for the post. If you are in sales that is in person sales calls, telephone calls out, client and prospect calls in regading orders and delivery queries, dialy/weekly reports to management, commission payment submissions etc.

If you are a shop assistant that is the preopening routine, loading the float into the cash register, setting up displays, loading stock, cleaning the shop, serving customers, handling refund requests, closing up, counting the till etc.

Every job has its normal traffic.

Then there are the abnormal traffic items. The ones that are not on your list of targets in your Programs or Projects on which you are working. How do you work out whether or not to do them and where they fit into your day? What follows are some tools and techniques to help you better answer that question.

The Most Productive Viewpoint, Skill and Strategy
One of the first rules I learned in economics was that there are always more things on which to spend money than there is money to spend.

The same is true for time. There are always more things to do than there is time to do them.

It is unrealistic to think at the beginning of the day, “I will be as efficient as possible and do everything that comes my way.”

I find as I learn more and increase my awareness, the more I see that needs to be done. As a result, every year I am less and less abble to do ‘everything that hits my plate in a day’.

The better you get, the lower the return you will obtain in trying to do more in the available time. Not that you should ever stop trying to be more efficient, to a point.

There is a law known as ‘The Law of Diminishing Returns’, a fundamental principle in economics, (also known as the law of diminishing marginal productivity) states that in a productive process, if a factor of production continues to increase (we’ll take speed), while holding all other production factors constant, at some point a further incremental unit of input will return a lower amount of output. Think of making mistakes as you do things at a speed greater than feels comfortable.

So a key element in determining your success in a given area is your selection of which things are important and take priority over all others.

That is the real skill – selecting the best task to do first. Once you master this skill you will have more time than you thought possible to do the highest value tasks.

The most effective strategy is to:
– select the most important task in terms of how well it closes the gap between where you are and where you want to be,
– complete that task as efficiently as possible,
– rinse and repeat.

Triage
Triage is a French word meaning to pick or sort, used in medicine to describe how front line or ER staff prioritise patients to be seen. It is usually relied upon when there are more injured individuals than available care providers or when there are more injuries than supplies to treat them.

Most often, patients are grouped into three categories:
A) Those almost certain to die, regardless of how much effort is expended.
B) Those who will most likely only survive given timely treatment.
C) Those most likely to survive, treated or not.

One treatment regime is to do as little as possible that will relieve the pain for group A. For those in group C to stop bleeding, prevent infection etc. and to devote most of the available medical personnel and supplies to maximise the survival potential for those in group B, those for whom it will make the most difference.

OK, that’s picking and sorting in the medical field. How can we apply that to the workaday world, or even at home?

There are various tools you can use to increase your chances of success in this regard. I will detail several so you can choose the one with which you are most comfortable to commence.

Feel free to come back to this article after a month then quarterly to revist the others to see if you can take your effectiveness and efficiency to a new high level.

Task Evaluation
When a task hits your plate that is not part of your programs or projects, there are really five questions to ask yourself:
Should this be done?
Is this the right thing to do?
What result must it produce?
Is it delegatable or do I need to do it?
How can we obtain the product as efficiently as possible?

I have seen a couple of tools to help with this.
One of them was a grid into which you assign each task:

Difficult & Dislike Difficult & Like
Delegate first (easy tasks you hate) Do it yourself – enjoy the challenge!
Easy & Dislike Easy & Like
Delegate first Delegate or do it – whatever you prefer

The premise being that if a task was easy and you dislike it then that falls into the group you should delegate first. Cleaning the bathroom comes instantly to mind!

You can then delegate the easy tasks that you like.

By then you have hopefully found someone competent enough to do the difficult tasks that your dislike.

This leaves you doing the complex, difficult tasks that you enjoy. And as a result you are a lot happier at your job!

Productive Work Versus Completed Work
The product of a task is not necessarily the goal. It is only useful if obtaining that product contributes to achieving the goal.

Not every task moves the marker towards your goal the same distance.

The optimum result is obtained by identifying the most important task(s) calculated to most rapidly forward your progress towards your goal and by getting that task done to the required standard with as little wasted motion and as few resources as possible.

To consistently attain this optimum result from your efforts necessitates that you:
– have goals
– know what products it will take to attain the goal
– have those products prioritised so you know their relative importance in moving you forward
– set your weekly and daily production targets with emphasis on the high priority products aligned to your goals for that activity

This is a major departure from the way many of us operate most of the time. I have, from time to time, observed in myself and gotten agreement from others on, an operating basis that when you stop and take a look back at it feels like ‘running on automatic’.

So if you find merit in the above, the first action to take is to decide to ‘come off automatic’ and allocate some time to identify your goals for different areas of your life.

Pareto Principle Applied to Target Selection
A fairly commonly known concept known as the Pareto Principle asserts that 80 per cent of results come from 20 per cent of the causes – 80% of sales come from 20% of clients.

According to this principle, one of your evaluation points when planning the sequence of your tasks should be to identify from a given set of targets which are the 20% that will yield 80% of the progress towards your goal.

The Four ‘D’s
One person told me they classify every task into what they called one of the four ‘D’s.

Do
Drop
Defer
Delegate

This is a brilliant tool for handling emails as most of us read and reread our emails which instantly doubles our workload.

Do: You may have heard of the ‘2 minute rule’. If a tast takes less than two minutes and it does not fall into those that can and should be dropped, it is most efficient to do it now.

It is alawys more efficient to ‘do it now’ as you spend zero time rereading it, no time reorienting yourself to it, no time delegating or diarising it but to have ‘do it now’ as your only tool puts you at the effect of every cycle that hits your plate and no point of cause over your priorites or schedule.

Drop: One question to ask is, “What would happen if I just dropped this completely?” If the answer is, “Nothing negative.” you’ve just made your call.

If the answer is a negative but it is less on the minus side of the ledger than your other tasks are on the positive side, you may still be better off dropping it due to the opportunity cost.

Saying no and dropping trivial value tasks is the fastest way to do more of the right things. Research shows people who say no to 20–30% of requests reclaim 5+ hours a week and focus better on the Pareto 20% that actually move the goal.

Another study of knowledge workers found that those who said no to 30% of incoming requests had 25% more focused work time and 40% higher satisfaction. That’s a huge payoff for learning to say no and drop more tasks.

Defer: If the tasks is yours, important enough to do but can safely be deferred to another time, log it however you log future tasks and move on. The necessity to do some tasks evaporates in time so it can pay dividends to not do some things instantly.

Of course there is a danger that you build up too many tasks in your deferred pipeline that it creates an overload down the track so be mindful of this and check your deferred tasks at a frequency appropriate to your activity to ensure this does not happen.

Delegate: If the task properly belongs to another person, hand the request back to whomever gave it to you with the name, position title and contact details of to whom it should be forwarded.

If it belongs to one of your subordinates, inform them of it with all necessary data and a deadline appropriate to their workload and priorites.

The Eisnhower Method
Another tool was a similar grid suggesting you classify tasks according to Urgency and Importance that came from a saying attributed to the American General then President Dwight D Eisenhower: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

Urgent but Not Important Urgent & Important
Delegate-Put out fires and move on Do-Tackle these right now
Not Urgent & Not Important Not Urgent but Important
Drop-Delete or delegate Defer-Log it and do later

 

The observation can be made that a lot of time can be consumed on doing things that are urgent but not important to the detriment of the important things that are not urgent.

This leaves you ‘putting out fires’ but not making significant progresss towards your goal. Frustrating and discouraging.

In assigning each task to one of these four categories you might decide that many tasks in the Not Urgent and Not Important category can be dropped or delegated, leaving you more time for the higher priority tasks.

PICK Chart
While researching for this article I came across a tool apparently used by Lockheed Martin for evaluating process improvement possibilities. It looks like this:

Low Payoff High Payoff
Easy to Do Possible – Explore further Implement – Start now
Hard to Do Kill – Drop the idea Challenge – Test thoroughly

According to Wikipedia:
PICK charts are a method to prioritize a number of action items or problem solving ideas. A pick chart allows visual comparison of action items relative to their impact to the problem being addressed vs. the ease/cost of implementation. In very rudimentary terms, PICK charts are a Return on Investment (ROI) method.

When faced with multiple improvement ideas a PICK chart may be used to determine the most useful. There are four categories on a 2*2 matrix; horizontal is scale of payoff (or benefits), vertical is ease of implementation. By deciding where an idea falls on the pick chart four proposed project actions are provided; Possible, Implement, Challenge and Kill (thus the name PICK).

Normally the result of using this would be the creation of a Program or Project containing multiple targets to implement the idea.

MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Learn To Say No!
I had a management consultant say to me many years ago that it was very important for a small business owner to learn to say No.

He said opportunity was the enemy of small business owners or entrepreneurs as they could see opportunity everywhere but did not have the resources of a large enterprise to take advantage of them – these ‘opportunities’ became a distraction.

I can recall examples of very large businesses perceiving an opportunity in acquiring a smaller business only to have some very large investments totally evaporate value wise in less than 5 years. So I think the problem is not restricted to small businesses.

So that is saying no on a large scale. It also applies to minor tasks.

A Low Impact ‘No’
If a person comes to see you at a time that does not suit or they are a time waster or the subject matter is not key to your post, one technique can use is to stand and greet the person but not invite them to sit. You could say, “Let’s grab a coffee together. What did you want to discuss?” and steer them towards the elevator.

This puts you at cause over the duration of the conversation far more politely than standing and saying, “Time for you to go.” when you have determined it is done.

Block Timetable To Cement High Priority Tasks
Way back in the early 1970s when I was training to be a supermarket manager, Woolworths introduced me to a block timetable for the workplace.

Of course school is the first place most of us are exposed to the concept. But I don’t see a great many people applying it past there. Except for being at work bewtween x and y and travel time to and from. But not for tasks.

It can be a very useful tool to prevent the minor priorities taking up more of your schedule that they should. You may have heard the saying, “The job expands to fill the available time.” Well here is one way to limit the available time taken up by low priority jobs – schedule blocks of time for your high priority tasks.

In fact it is much more than merely a useful tool, this is the single habit that most separates people who ‘have time’ from those who don’t.

If your high priority task is a creative one, make sure you schedule the space in your block timetable during a time of day when you are most on the ball.

To give you one idea of how to do one, here is one of mine filled in for my diet and exercise scheduled items arranged around my course study time.

Here is one of mine filled in for my diet and exercise scheduled items arranged around my course study time.

Diet and Exercise Block Timetable

Playing the Piano
A CEO who dives into one division and spends an inordinate amount of time there is thereby neglecting other divisions to their detriment.

An individual who focuses too heavily on one area of life and ignores others is setting themselves up for failure in those other areas. Such a failure may completely undo the gains in the one area on which attention was focused.

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity answered, “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never truly lived.”

I heard an expression that covers this well. Whether a CEO or a worker on the factory floor, we all need to develop the skill of ‘playing the piano’ – moving from one division in the organisation, if a CEO, or one area of life to another, regularly and with dexterity, such that we keep all the juggling balls in the air and none drop to the floor.

If you instantly rebut this with some version of, “But if I do that then…” I would encourage you to sit down and revisit your goals and priorities for different areas of your life.

Statistics
Management guru Peter Drucker said many years ago: “What gets measured gets managed.” so your management is improved considerably be keeping daily and weekly statistics on the production of your products.

Statistics should measure the quantity of that being produced but only those that are produced to the required standard. This discourages the number being artificially inflated by low quality products.

The degree to which the product contributes to the viability of the activity also determines whether or not it should be staticised.

Ideally a weekly graphed statistic should be on a long-term up-trend. Tools exist to help in managing an activity based on the trend of the line on a statistic graph. If better management interests you, get in touch with me. I can recommend a course I did many years ago that helped me enourmously.

Overall Framework

1. Set Goal – Decide what you want to achieve.

2. Plan – Decide the overall Plan, the Programs, Projects and Targets will move you towards the goal. Prioritise target sequence. Set your Block Timetable.

3. Manage – Eliminate tasks that don’t contribute or contribute minorly. Categorise and handle that which hits you plate each day. Batch similar tasks.

4. Produce – Produce the required products of your post effectively and efficiently to the required standard.

5. Inspect – Inspect the completed products to ensure they meet the required standard.

6. Review – Check the quantity, quality and viability of products produced per statitics and whether the products produced actually moved you towards the goal.

7. Adjust and repeat.

If you want to get deeper into this I can recommend a free course that teaches you about planning production and setting targets in a lot more detail. Drop me a line. I will be happy to share it with you.

Once you have fleshed out your framework a really valuable question to ask yourself is, “What are the top 3 things that, if I got perfect at in the next 12 months, would make everything else easier or more valuable?”

And of course then allocating some time to acquiring those skills.

And before you go down in the mouth contemplating the time it would take, remember that most people over estimate what they can get done in a day and under estimate what they can accomplish in five years.

I did not post 18,000+ blog posts and write two 2,000+ page books in two weeks, I can assure you!

In Conclusion
Being busy is not evidence of being effective or efficient.
Having an operating basis of being efficient at low priority items sabotages your progress towards your goal.
Working inefficiently on high priority targets yields slower progress towards your goal.

~~~~~~~~~~

To your ever growing effective efficiency.

Tom Grimshaw
tom@tomgrimshaw.com

Additional Reading:
How To Work Out Your Basic Purpose In Life: https://www.tomgrimshaw.com/tomsblog/?p=37862

Boosting Your Confidence:

Boosting Your Confidence

On Bringing Order
https://www.bringorder.info/English.html

Addressing Procrastination:
https://www.tomgrimshaw.com/tomsblog/?p=67238

How To Boost Self-Discipline:
https://www.tomgrimshaw.com/tomsblog/?p=67086