Week 3 - The Efficiency Trap

Welcome to Week 3 of my Self-Help Slow Read of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals. We will read through the book one chapter at a time, using excerpts, reflections, resources, and questions that stimulate conversation and actions, with an occasional dash of healthy skepticism.

This week – Chapter 2: The Efficiency Trap

If this is your first time here, visit the Four Thousand Weeks reading schedule for more details.

We’ve all have felt it: too much to do, too much to see, but never enough time to do it all. But we still try to do more by finding shortcuts, apps, systems, or get up earlier, work later, and still at the end of all the busy life we lead, we still feel somehow still behind or burnt out.

“Busyness isn’t our only time problem….but it’s a unique vivid illustration of the effort we invest in fighting against our build-in limitations, thanks to how normal it has become to feel as though you absolutely must do more than you can do” (37).

He does bring up the obvious but easily ignored idea that:

“It can’t be the case that you must do more than you can do. That notion doesn’t make any sense; if you truly don’t have time for everything you want to do, or feel you ought to do, or that others are badgering you to do, then, well, you don’t have time - no matter how grave the consequences of failing to do it all might prove to be … So technically, it’s irrational to feel troubled by an overwhelming to-do list” (38).

Thinking about it from a purely thinking perspective, of course it’s irrational. So why then do we keep doing it?

Because it’s more than a rational versus irrational problem, there could be an emotional factor behind it. We feel we must do more and the why behind that feeling will be different for everyone. Maybe it’s driven by ambition or people pleasing or envy or perfectionism or shame.

Whatever it is, it could be an unconscious or ignored part of ourselves and our busyness keeps those feelings just out of view enough to keep ourselves from facing uncomfortable things about our lives.

“Instead, in an attempt to avoid these unpleasant truths, we deploy the strategy that dominates most conventional advice on how to deal with busyness: we tell ourselves we’ll just have to find a way to do more - to try to address our busyness, you could say, by making ourselves busier still” (39).

Next, Burkeman brings us to a discussion of Parkinson’s law, which says “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” As an example, if I get assigned two weeks to complete a minor work project, will I finish it early? I’ll take the two weeks, and more than likely, I’ll procrastinate the until the last couple days before it’s due. Or I’ll spend those two weeks researching, perfecting, revising, re-perfecting right up until the last moment. Did I really need all that time? Maybe, maybe not.

I don’t know if this is necessarily good or bad, but in a busy dominated culture, we probably spend a lot of time making that “project” busier than it needs. Or we feel the pressure to get done sooner, so we can fill in that left-over extra time with more things to get done.

So between planners and pomodoro clocks, we probably will end up with some free time. The only problem is that all that free time just gets filled right back up with other things that we feel need to be done.

I think this can also can happen with space as well as time. I’m reminded of when highways get expanded to help lessen congestion, but adding more lanes always just allows more congestion to exist. There is no way to catch up. (And don’t get me started with books and bookshelves.)

“Rendering yourself more efficient, either by implementing various productivity techniques, or by driving yourself harder, won’t generally result on the feeling of having enough time, because all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do” (43).

“Rendering yourself more efficient” is a striking phrase. It reminded me of rendering some bacon fat in a pan. It seems like all this pursuit of efficiency is cooking out the so called “wasted” hours to bring ourselves to a lean productive contributing member of society.

It also make me pause to consider why do we use the word “efficient” to describe ourselves? Are we to become shaped into a thing, like a machine, to spit out widgets of things and activities we’ve done of ever increasingly speed and scale?

To what end? There only seems to be one direction efficiency moves, which does not include anything that would slow it down, take a rest, or go in reverse. And so, just like a machine, we can eventually break down, and sometimes, possibly, even become irreparable. I don’t think human biology evolved with this in mind.

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Next, Burkeman explores the “seductive lure convenience” (51) and how that contributes to our busy mis-priorities.

“Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks” (55).

He talks about how companies find our human pain points and smoothes off the rough edges by the endless supply of apps and services we’ve all become easily too fond of, from email to next day shipping, instant entertainment in one’s pocket, endless food delivery apps, and so forth. I’m sure we all have our conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to.

And by having such instant convenience at our fingertips is supposed to save more time for the more “important” things. But how often do we take advantage of the that? I know i’m guilty of just filing up that free time with more things that are not necessarily bad, but might not be what I value either. It’s easy to click and tap our way through life day to day in an endless supply. It reminds me of the humans in the Pixar film Wall-E.

It’s given me pause thinking of giving up some conveniences, even momentarily, to see if anything shifts in the way I feel and show up in life.

“… smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities” (52).

Time to think of letting some unsmoothed edges back in my life.

To wrap up, Burkeman explores the idea that a full and busy life isn’t just about getting wrapped up in the endless, tedious tasks that fill up our time. But also, one’s full and busy life can be filled with all the wonderful experiences that life has to offer, i.e. the “bucket list”.

He highlights an interesting idea from German sociologist, Hartman Rose, who wrote that “when people stop believing in an after life, everything depends on making the most of this life.” In connecting that to a bucket list is an interesting idea to sit with and not sure what to think of it yet, but seems likely a factor.

”The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or ought to have, on top of all those you’ve already had” (xx).

And there are so many wonderful things to experience. Immediately one thinks of traveling, food, writing a book, running a marathon, skydiving, etc....Just to take a small example that I can relate on a daily is books and reading. The more I read, the more I want to read, the more books I acquire, the more I discover, the wish list gets longer and the bucket list quickly becomes bottomless. And that seems to the be problem. In trying to experience everything the overwhelm increases and choice paralysis can set in without me even noticing and I still don’t get around to finish reading War and Peace.

So what to do with our endless wishlists of life?

“You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable loss, that results.”

Easier said than done. But over the last few years I’ve felt that more acutely now more than ever. If I don’t focus on the a few things, then I feel a sense of always being spread to thin across all the things that fill my life up. It’s feels like a tension between breadth and depth. What can we do to slow ourselves down and become more aware of the busyness that surrounds our lives and start making better choices?

“Learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding, by trying to fit more in.”

Learning to stay with that anxiety or discomfort or stress is probably the key. It’s easy to run away from it by filling up our mind and time with another thing that everyone seems to be talking about, but where does that leave us? That feeling lurking beneath stays lurking, maybe even festering and getting worse until it becomes inevitable to avoid. Better to face it head on, early and often.

How? I suppose that’s different for everyone, but starting small and building on it seems like the only way. A few minutes, an hour, a day, a week, the longer one sits with it, maybe that urge to fill our time with stuff slowly begins to lose its grip. And as it does then we maybe it gets easier to make the choices that we value more.

But I also think it’s about learning how to stay with that sense of loss, of those things you will never experience. It’s a sort of grief. But how to get past the denial stage? Not sure.