Humans increase efficiency by taking lessons from past experiences, and reading every manual has not proven efficient. Indeed, the downside is that one may miss that exceptional useful one.
Me typing this message is not the way to spend my time efficiently... ;-)

What I do is I try the man page first and if it seems messy or complicated I look for an online tutorial. I've found good ones here for example:

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/

Some man pages are better than others, no doubt about it, especially for complicated programs like find, sed, awk.