Efficiency sickness

More out of every minute, indefinitely. shades of "time is money" #10

Writing is inefficient. 

Several months ago, I signed up for a writing workshop. The premise was, show up every day and write for 15 minutes. “Drip by drip” (à la Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird) was the slogan of encouragement. And this worked for me, because at the time, all I had were drips.

I’d find that in fifteen minutes, I could write 500 words. But more often it would be more like 50, as my motherhood-mangled mind struggled to eek out some coherent capture of a thought. It bothered me that my rate of efficiency varied within an allotment of time. On the days I wrote 50 words, I felt inefficient. And this feeling of inefficiency was not neutral; it was bad.

The reason I know I have an unhealthy relationship with efficiency— efficiency sickness as I’m calling it— makes itself known in the shame I experience when mucking through a perceived inefficiency. (Perceived here is key.)

For me, efficiency is such an internalized value that it rules much of the way I structure my time and life. It is a dominating factor in decisions big and small. And the turmoil I tend to feel at a moment not perfectly maximized… the groaning grief at a minute forgone without adequate yield… well, I’m wondering if anyone else feels this way too?

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Welcome back to our series, twenty shades of “time is money” — we’re breaking down findings from research on social acceleration, marketing, and consumer culture.

This research helped me better understand my own relationship to time and consumption (and specifically, the felt need to constantly be busy and hurry through life and buy things as an antidote to this frenzy). Thank you for reading, and I hope there is a nugget of inspiration for you here too.

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My hunch is that I’m not alone in this efficiency sickness, but that I might suffer a higher degree than most.

My research on the “time is money” US cultural myth validates that an efficiency narrative has been woven throughout mass consumer culture. It is the tenth theme from my research findings:

More Efficient

"Today's pace of life requires greater productivity (more accomplishments in the same amount of time) in order to keep up with everyday demands."

1920 advertisement by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Here, the telephone “is the most effective agency for making minutes more useful, more efficient.” Superimposed over past, less efficient means of connecting people and information (a steamboat, a locomotive, a trolley, an automobile), the triumphant telephone normalizes adopting the latest technologies to achieve the greatest efficiencies. This is simple and innocent in the context of communication devices - but is there a line to consider when we transfer this idea to adjacent product categories? Or to other parts of our lives?

1948 advertisement for the Clary calculator. Here, efficiency is not presented as a neutral descriptor but an important predictor of mood: “What a wonderful feeling to be caught up with your work!” = It feels good to be efficient! Further, “The extra speed of speed of Clary makes it possible to do more in a day” normalizes that you *should* do more in a day because you *can* do more in a day. Efficiency is equated with a value of happiness and expectation.

1926 advertisement for Collier’s “Five-Foot Shelf of Books”. I mean… “do you realize how much more you could do and earn if … you knew the secret of fifteen minutes a day?” Knowledge work (as signified by the men wearing suits and hats) is positioned over manual work (as signified by the man wearing overalls and holding a shovel).

Within this particular theme of the “time is money” myth, it’s not so much that we are saving time, but that we are maximizing units of activity, or productivity, within a static period of time. “More efficiency” normalizes that we ought to wring our hands around every minute, knowing that the minutes are scarce, as marginal improvements to productivity drip out the other side of our effort. 

In a season of mothering littles, I practice this type of time maximization every day, particularly during nap time. The second after my kids lie their pretty little heads down, I know I have 90 minutes, maybe more, to eek out whatever hope of productivity I have.

(And even when I practice the radical act of 😱 rest during nap time, I still feel the urge to maximize this rest, asking myself questions like: Will I feel most rested if I do a 20 minute yoga video and then drink a smoothie and then lie down for a moment and listen to a podcast? OR should I read a book outside in the yard, absorbing natural sunlight and all its benefits¹? Either way, the constraint is the same: I have a set amount of time, and how should I maximize it?

What I’ve found is that this law of motherhood time economics has made me incredibly productive. But it’s also made it nearly impossible for me to just relax without guilt — for there is almost always some “more productive” and thus seemingly “better” “use of my time” (btw, I’m using quotations here mostly to remind me, as I write this, how silly the little time-maximization games that rule in my head tend to be). It’s the constant calculation (and re-calculation and re-calculation) of efficiency that causes the sickness I’m dancing around diagnosing for myself.

But I’m typing it out, facing it straight on the screen, and even naming a post after it:

Efficiency sickness.

The cure?

Doing things that are decidedly inefficient.

Writing the silly little substack post. Plucking the guitar strings. Peeling mounds of garden-fresh garlic. Playing on the floor.

There’s always something more efficient you could be doing.

The only way to overcome the sickness of efficiency is to say, “Yes — but it doesn’t matter.”

1. Yes I’ve been over-consuming the Huberman Lab podcast