In several dictionaries, efficiency is defined as the ability to obtain a product or effect an outcome in a way that does not waste resources, for example in the form of money, time and materials. Conveniently, the relevant metrics to evaluate the efficiency of methods or syntheses in this sense are already at our disposal. Monetary investment can be evaluated via the cost of reagents, time by the number of steps and reaction times and material use through a green chemistry metric of choice. However, the trend in many papers recently is to describe a method as efficient solely based on the yield of a reaction. This ignores other factors such as the origin of the starting materials (i.e. if they had to be synthesized beforehand via a lengthy route of their own) and the amount of reagents, solvents and workup materials used as well as the time it took to perform that synthesis. Clearly, focusing on just one outcome paints an incomplete and potentially misleading picture.