Efficiency is inefficient

If you're going to be efficient about efficiency, you need to be willing to be inefficient about it.

The readiest, most efficient people you know are the ones who live it, efficient at all times, in the smallest things, even when it comes to things that no one but that person will see or interact with. Organizing spice racks and watch collections and papers in stacks and such.

These small organization efforts are secretly, quietly done from force of habit, or, (more gently) for the pleasure of order. They're not done for any serious attempt at precontemplated efficiency gains. And these small efforts take an extraordinary amount of time.

The payoff for putting that much effort into practicing efficiency is that you're ready to organize larger things at any time, appearing very efficient in front of other people. But so much is spent being efficient in matters that don't really matter. There's a diminishing returns, a Planck's Constant of efficiency, below which, any more efficiency actually becomes less efficient.

But efficient people do it anyway.

P.S. This principle also works to anything else you want to be good at.