If you ran a snowblower over the driveway recently, you probably had the thought that occupies many of us when we shovel or mow the lawn: What’s the most efficient way to do this?

In circles, or straight lines? Hit the tricky parts first, or later?

Some of us are addicted to this pursuit of efficiency. When I played sports in high school, I tried to find the most economical footwork with everything I did — even things like going through a doorway or around the table to set the places.

This comes to mind now because, barring something remarkable, stock-market investors will finish the first two months of the year with little or nothing to show for their efforts. Most of the major indexes are flat or down, and all are still way below the peaks they hit five years ago.

If this is the way things are likely to go for some time, the key to achieving any long-term financial goal will be found in investing efficiency — mainly by minimizing costs.

If you’ll earn only 5 percent or 6 percent a year, which seems possible now, 1 percentage point in costs strips away 16 percent to 20 percent of your gains.

Even if returns settle at a healthy 7 percent or 8 percent a year, a mere 1-point loss to costs can have a huge effect on compounding. A $1,000 investment earning an average of 8 percent a year would grow to $4,660 in 20 years. If costs dragged the average return to 7 percent, that investment would grow to only $3,870.

Some investing costs are obvious, while others are nearly invisible — though still avoidable.

Brokerage commissions are obvious. With a full-service broker, hefty commissions pay for the broker’s advice.

Unless those tips truly enhance returns, full-service commissions are best avoided. Use a discount brokerage that offers no advice but charges only a few dollars per trade.

Churn is another destroyer of efficiency. This means excessive buying and selling, and paying commissions over and over. Churn also produces annual tax bills that could be postponed if you kept your investments for the long run.

For most small investors, it’s far more efficient to use mutual funds to build a broad-based portfolio than it is to buy and sell individual stocks and bonds, but fund costs can be very damaging.

Avoid funds that charge a “load,” which is an up-front sales commission. For any good load fund, there is sure to be a comparable no-load fund.

Also pay attention to funds’ expense ratios — costs deducted from your investments to pay the fund’s managers. Many “managed” stock funds, which actively seek the hottest investments, have expenses of well over 1 percentage point a year. Index-style funds, which simply buy and hold the stocks in an underlying market barometer, such as the Standard & Poor’s 500, often charge only one-fifth as much.

Funds also have invisible charges, such as the commissions they pay to buy and sell stocks and bonds. You can safely assume that a fund that has a lot of turnover — that makes many changes in its holdings during the year — has bigger hidden costs. Turnover is reported; the lower the better. Try to keep it below 25 percent.

Funds also can create tax bills, often unexpectedly. A fund that owns stocks, for example, may well receive dividend payments which, by law, must be passed on to shareholders. They are taxable even if you reinvest them.

If a fund earns a net profit on stocks or bonds it sold during the year, those capital gains also must be passed to shareholders, triggering tax bills.

So if you are attracted to a fund that tends to have large dividend and capital gain distributions, you can enhance your efficiency by purchasing it through a tax-deferred account such as an IRA or 401(k). Tax on distributions will thus be postponed until you sell fund shares.

Efficiency also is improved if you keep in mind the differences between long- and short-term capital gains rates. These apply to investments held in ordinary taxable accounts and sold at a profit.

The long-term rate, which applies to investments held longer than a year, is 15 percent. The short-term rate, for investments owned a year or less, equals your income-tax rate, which can be as high as 35 percent.

Because of this — as well as most of the other factors I noted — you’ll be more efficient if you pick investments you can hold for the long term. Inefficiencies of various kinds can easily sap 2, 3 or 4 percentage points from your returns every year, demolishing your hopes of meeting a long-term goal like retiring comfortably or paying your children’s college tuition.