The Trouble with Efficiency
It's All Relative, Really
I'm in a hurry to get things done
Oh, I rush and rush until life's no fun
All I really gotta do is live and die
Even I'm in a hurry and don't know why
Above: On a long enough journey, 1° can be the difference between life and death.1
French electronic music duo Daft Punk inadvertently wrote the anthem of modernity with the lyrics:
Work it, make it
Do it, makes us
Harder, better
Faster, stronger
More than, hour
Hour, never
Ever, after
Work is, over
Work it, make it
Do it, makes us
Harder, better
Faster, stronger.
This celebration of productivity and progress for its own sake pays no heed to how or why we do what we do.
In a world obsessed with "faster, better, stronger," we've lost the plot.
We're stuck in the means, at the expense of the end. Just as fast work begets ever more work, so too does efficiency breed an endless cycle of optimization.
But to what end? It's no use running if your destination is Hell.
Efficiency zealots are like mirages: the greatest trick they ever pulled was to convince the world that busyness equals importance.
They seldom stop their hamster wheels long enough to ask why they're running in the first place.
A pertinent scene from The Matrix comes to mind.
Agent Smith's words bear repeating:
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern.
Do you know what it is?
A virus.
We've become viruses of productivity, consuming both hours and resources without thought to equilibrium or lasting impact.
So why do we pine for fleeting efficiency? After all, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
True efficacy, on the other hand, is like common sense: exceptionally hard to find (if it even exists at all).
It asks not "How much can I do?" but "What truly matters?"
Mother Teresa, hardly a paragon of efficiency by modern standards, understood this deeply: "It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into doing."
Her impact wasn't measured in tasks completed or hours optimized, but in lives touched and hearts moved.
To paraphrase Amos Tversky: It's frightening to think that you might not be productive enough, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what being productive (or efficacious) means.
This took me years to learn: no one truly knows what matters in the long run. The relationship (let alone distance) between input and output is often comically unjust.
A quick, heartfelt tweet can often supersede a massive tome.
A smile can prevent a suicide when used effectively.
In a world of expediency and affectation, the real act of rebellion is integrity. It's focusing on efficacy over efficiency. It's realizing that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
James Clear puts it succinctly: "In the long-run, prioritization beats efficiency."
This isn't to say we should abandon all attempts at improvement. Rather, it's a call to recalibrate our respective compasses.
As C.S. Lewis wisely noted:
Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
Focus on the output delivered, not the input required, and keep moving forward on the straight and narrow.
Remember, growth unchecked is cancer. Let's accentuate the positive and metastasize good cells, not malignancies.
At the end of the day, no one really knows what will make the biggest difference. We're all trying our best with the time we've been given—inching forward and groping along in an unfathomable dark.
With that, be a good steward of your energy, your purpose, your people, and your planet.
Use the gifts you've been given.
Perform ordinary acts of grace with a humble heart and good intent.
Because in this crazy, efficiency-obsessed world, true efficacy might just be found in those small things done with great love.2
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
Consider this. If you're going somewhere and you're off course by just one degree, after one foot, you'll miss your target by 0.2 inches. Trivial, right? But what about as you get farther out?
After 100 yards, you'll be off by 5.2 feet. Not huge, but noticeable.
After a mile, you'll be off by 92.2 feet. One degree is starting to make a difference.
After traveling from San Francisco to L.A., you'll be off by 6 miles.
If you were trying to get from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., you'd end up on the other side of Baltimore, 42.6 miles away.
Traveling around the globe from Washington, DC, you'd miss by 435 miles and end up in Boston.
In a rocket going to the moon, you'd be 4,169 miles off (nearly twice the diameter of the moon).
Going to the sun, you'd miss by over 1.6 million miles (nearly twice the diameter of the sun).
Traveling to the nearest star, you'd be off course by over 441 billion miles (120 times the distance from the earth to Pluto, or 4,745 times the distance from Earth to the sun).
Over time, a mere one-degree error in course makes a huge difference.
A version of this article first appeared on SENT Ventures.
Dead on, Tom. As I wrote once, we do not exist to maximize productivity.