Maximum Effort or Maximum Efficiency?

Optimize for the goal.

Is there a way to measure (maximum) efficiency without trying everything in maximum effort?

"you never know what will pay off". I think you do.

Going through an example, let's say you want to sell a product;

You can either fetch a 1000 potential buyers' e-mail, prepare a cold-email, mass-send and wait for returns.

You can search for a single potential buyer, spend a month to get to know them by sparing an hour per week, befriend if needed and pitch your product in the end.

If we consider these as the two edge cases, you can try both and have your results in the end. 1000 emails may bring 5 customers, other method may bring 8. So you start experimenting with the better working method.

Going back to "you never know" you never know if that's the most efficient way. Instead of building the next twitter tool, you can find an established twitter tool with affiliate commissions and try to sell it. Instead of building and marketing at the same time, you may be better selling other's products. Or find a marketer as a co-founder and let them do the job. You never know the most efficient way without trying every possible one.

In the end you probably have assumptions and maybe past experiences that leads you to different conclusions. My suggestion would be to leave them at the door and try again with your current self.

Maximum efficiency looks appealing, but the problem is that I don't know what's worth doing. So gor now I rather stick to maximum effort, but I'm starting to burn out.

Maximum output, over long time frames