In Defense of Inefficiency
Efficiency & productivity are great and all—but have you tried inefficiency?
One of the biggest hurdles that our podcasting clients deal with is the inherent inefficiency of making great episodes. Sure, there are ways to make podcasting (or any form of media making) more efficient—ways to save time, skills to learn, all those little 'tricks' that make a difference over months or years. But a good, let alone great, podcast episode requires hundreds or thousands of decisions that can only be made in the thick of the process.
Being 'in process' can feel like going nowhere fast.
I spent the last two hours poking around the web, checking the indices of books in my office, and spinning around in my chair while I thought about what I wanted to write today. Now that I'm into this draft, I'm hopeful that I can make steady progress—but that is in no way guaranteed or even likely. This work is inefficient by any stretch of the imagination!
Update: I mostly made steady progress.
In the age of automation, doing things inefficiently and allowing oneself to be 'in process' runs counter to the advice of productivity gurus and the logic of the market. Every time I start a draft or conduct an interview, I'm confronted with the time and effort I use to produce work that will inevitably find its way to my 'Cuts' folder. That kind of inefficiency can feel taboo if you're already overcommitted and overscheduled.
Don't get me wrong: I get frustrated with inefficient systems and redundant procedures as much as any anxious overachiever. I enjoy the process of tightening things up and finding ways to make future Tara's life a little easier. But today, I wanted to spend some time reflecting on the pitfalls of efficiency and the value of inefficiency.
I'll say at the jump that I'm not against efficiency or its partner, productivity. I'm for inefficiency. And I believe it's a critical value for work in the 21st-century economy.
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What is 'efficiency?'
It's important to define terms before I go further. 'Efficiency' and its frequent partner, 'productivity,' tend to be words we use casually. We assume we know what they mean. Getting specific with their definitions allows us to examine them more closely and with fewer presumptions.
To define efficiency, we must first define productivity.
Productivity is a way to describe yield as it relates to time.
When I say I've had a 'productive day,' I mean how much I produced (yield) during the working time I had available (capacity) was at or above my expectations. Before productivity before the advent of scientific management, productivity commonly described the crop yield that a parcel of land could produce in a season or the number of goods a factory could produce in a day.
Efficiency is a way to describe productivity or effectiveness as it relates to waste.
A system is efficient when it produces the desired outcomes without expending unnecessary energy or generating unusable byproducts. To use my example from above, I might deem my writing or podcasting process efficient if all of those words that end up in my "Cuts" folder were necessary (i.e., not waste) to get to my desired outcome (i.e., a ready-to-publish essay or episode). Of course, that's not generally what's meant by 'efficient' in casual speech.
When many of us say a process is 'efficient,' we really mean that we've 'produced' nothing that is unusable or unnecessary. Nothing gets cut, reworked, or struggled over. No time or effort is spent experimenting or considering a different approach. There are no redos or second takes. We've eliminated all friction so that the gears of our work turn as quickly as possible.
I'll admit that is an extreme version of what we mean when we talk about efficiency, but I know from both my personal history and my work with others that it's an ideal many strive toward. And that ideal leaves a mark. It doesn’t lead to satisfying work, remarkable work products, or compelling experiences for consumers of that work.
With that definition of efficiency in mind, let's examine some of its pitfalls.
A Loss of Value
Productivity and efficiency—as they relate to human labor—are inventions of industrialization and management science. The more productive and efficient our labor is, the more profitable it is. I say that as a statement of fact, not a moral or ethical position.
When we increase our productivity and efficiency on behalf of an employer without seeing an increase in compensation, we begin to feel taken advantage of. While there is plenty of room to debate fair compensation policies and how they relate to profit, I think most of us have either experienced or can imagine scenarios in which the relationship between productivity and profit becomes out of whack.
What about the self-employed worker or the small business owner? If we're pushing ourselves and, ostensibly, enjoying the profit of our labor, are we at risk of exploiting ourselves in the name of productivity? Yes—in both abstract and concrete ways.
Many independent workers and small business owners fail to distinguish between wages for labor and the business's (their) profit. Whatever comes in is split between business expenses and their personal bank accounts. This can easily lead to losing track of what their time, effort, and/or skill actually costs. They become more and more efficient without noticing that their hourly wage (or equivalent) should be going up and up.
In effect, it's wage stagnation. And without the separation between wages and profit, there's no mental model for noticing or fixing the problem. There's only the internal manager urging them to do more and waste less time.
Embracing inefficiency can remind us that more goes into delivering a service or manufacturing a product than the hands-on work we can squeeze into an hour. My writing doesn't happen if I don't account for a certain amount of staring out the window or researching dead-end topics. My podcast won't happen if I don't make space for second takes or listening to fifty different music tracks before deciding on an episode's sound design.
Creating valuable work—and understanding our contribution to that work as valuable—requires waste. And often, lots of it.