What is effectiveness vs efficiency?

Effectiveness vs efficiency is a concept in personal epistemology: Effectiveness means your agent produces the intended outcome, not just that it runs.

Example: You have a morning planning agent — a routine that fires every day at 7 AM where you review your priorities and set your top three tasks. It fires reliably. It runs every morning without fail. But after two months of tracking, you notice something: the tasks you select during morning planning are the tasks you actually complete only 35% of the time. By end of day, you've drifted to reactive work. The agent is reliable — it fires when it should. But it is not effective — it doesn't produce the outcome it exists for, which is aligned daily action. Reliability and effectiveness are different measurements asking different questions.

This concept is part of Phase 28 (Agent Monitoring) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent monitoring.