The community should certainly be encouraged to continue to strive for more efficient chemistry. However, a more effective use of "efficient" in the literature might be appropriate. Any method which accomplishes a given task is an effective method (i.e. it did the job), but its efficiency should be determined through comparison with other methods for the same task (i.e. how well did it do the job compared to known alternatives?). Thus, to describe a method as efficient one could benchmark this method against alternatives in the literature, for example in terms of number of steps required for the route, cost of reagents or material use. The latter can be evaluated via green chemistry metrics such as the environmental factor (E-factor) or process mass intensity (PMI), which are both simple mass-based metrics to describe the amount of waste produced for a (hypothetical) kilogram of product. Usually, the E-factor or PMI alone already provide a valuable insight into the overall wastefulness of a reaction or process, since they include all materials used for a transformation or route and correlate with the number of steps. While other green chemistry metrics may also be applied and might provide a comparable picture, consistency in the literature should be advocated and either of the metrics above are recommended for their simplicity and transparency. This, of course, does not mean that methods which are not efficient by the above definition do not have synthetic value (because certainly they do!). Other factors such as an improved substrate spectrum, milder/ambient conditions, simpler/more robust operational procedures or avoidance of hazardous/toxic reagents are all highly relevant and deserve attention from the field.