The Surprising Benefits Of Inefficiency
What saves us time also costs us.
Kipras śtremikis, Sorin Sîrbu | Unsplash The restaurant was little more than a collection of picnic tables, their legs submerged in sand. Behind them, the ocean sprawled — that vibrant, pulsing Caribbean blue. Bright and achingly beautiful.
My parents had read about the restaurant in a guidebook, and we had come prepared. We’d brought playing cards, journals, art supplies, books. The restaurant’s claim to fame was that it took over two hours to get your food. If you ordered chicken, which as I recall, may have been the only thing on the menu — if there was a menu at all — the chicken would be selected from a nearby yard, its neck wrung, its feathers stripped.
I was 11 years old at the time, already saddled with homework, already learning how to straddle the demands of basketball practice math worksheets, and weekend volunteer work.
Gone were childhood afternoons of leisurely play. No more exploration for exploration’s sake, no more elaborate games conjured from my imagination, no more aimless wandering. Time had become a precious resource, and the more efficiently I spent it, the more “successful” I would be.
But summer offered a respite from life’s increasing demands. It was summer for my parents, too, who were teachers at the same school that my sister and I attended. We had all ripped ourselves from our harried American schedules to explore the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. For a few precious weeks, we had all the time in the world.
When the meal finally arrived — after two pleasant hours of journaling, sketching, reading, and playing Rummy 500 — my stomach was audibly growling. We ate every morsel, picked at the chicken bones until they gleamed, and left feeling sated, making sure to pay our sincere compliments to the chef.
I’m 30 years older now, and in that time, the world has only gotten faster.
We not only eat with astonishing efficiency, but we can also get our food delivered — whatever it is we’re craving, not just pizza or Chinese. And not just food. Pretty much anything can be commanded at the click of a button to show up on our doorstep.
There is so much we can do at the click of a button. Find rides, purchase air travel, and hire someone to assemble our furniture. Armed with our apps and our smartwatches, we are walking models of efficiency. Maybe the buses don’t always arrive on schedule, but we can track them so we don’t have to waste our time waiting at the bus stop.
The worst thing that can happen is that something or somebody wastes our time. Efficiency is about squeezing every drop of time from every day. It’s about Maximum Productivity.
And you’d think, living in a world where we no longer have to wring a chicken’s neck to prepare dinner for our family, a world with McDonald’s and Starbucks drive-throughs, a world with microwaves and dishwashers and smartphone-enabled Roombas, a world with an entire army of apps dedicated to helping us Get Stuff Done, a world with an army of other apps helping us to revitalize, restore, and refocus so we can Get More Stuff Done… you’d think that all our efficiency would amount to something, wouldn’t you?
You’d think we’d have more time. But with each new innovation that claims to save us time, we only seem to end up with less of it.
There can be beauty in efficiency.
There can be satisfaction in tweaking a process to make it run just that much more smoothly, making a list and crossing items off throughout the day, and figuring out how to meet multiple needs in one fell swoop.
But we’ve taken efficiency too far. We haven’t been honest with ourselves about the trade-offs.
When I walk my kids home from their Jiu Jitsu class, we always pass a line of cars waiting outside the McDonald’s drive-through. Drivers give their orders to a brightly lit box, pull up to a window moments later, and retrieve their food. In the parking lot, they burrow their hands into greasy paper bags, squeeze ketchup from packets of foil, eat from waxy boxes perched precariously on their knees, and suck up sticky-sweet bubbles through plastic straws.
It’s efficient, I guess.
Except that it’s not, really. If McDonald’s aims to serve the cheapest food to the most people in the shortest amount of time, goals that are evident in its proud claims of “billions served,” then yes, I suppose it achieves these goals with remarkable efficiency.
But measures of efficiency depend on your metrics.
Think of all the discarded foil packets, boxes, bags, cups, straws, and napkins. Think of all the supersized fries that land in the trash. All the food that never gets sold. All the land that is cleared for grazing cows, the resources that go into processing and transporting the food, the resources that go into disposing of the food that never gets eaten.
It’s a problem that goes far beyond McDonald’s. According to the NRDC, up to 40 percent of food in the United States is never eaten. When I “efficiently” feed my family by purchasing four plastic-wrapped chicken thighs from the grocery store, somewhere else, chicken thighs are being thrown away.
I am quite sure that the restaurant in Costa Rica wasted no food — any leftovers went to the animals and the bones went to broth. Nearly everything that went into the meal was harvested nearby. There was little need for gas-guzzling trucks or plastic packaging.
By all measures, except for the number of minutes that elapsed between sitting down and actually eating, the operation was vastly more efficient than any fast food establishment, and likely most any restaurant in the United States, period. It was even more efficient than the “home-cooked” meals I rush to prepare in the 30-minute window I have between finishing work and sitting down to dinner with my family.
And it was a meal I remember even 30 years later when most other meals are a blur.
It’s not just food that we waste. It’s all the overstocked goods everywhere. We’ve built our lives and budgets around goods that are cheap and always available.
Efficient consumption, of course, relies on efficient production.
To efficiently produce, we have to waste something else — human capital. We need humans to produce as quickly as possible for as little pay as possible. We need them to cycle in and out of our companies before they make other demands.
Think of all the human potential unharnessed because people are too busy shuffling between factory floors and fast food cash registers, deliberately prevented from reimagining their circumstances, worried first and foremost about feeding children and making rent. Shelved so low on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that they don’t have the time, resources, or energy to innovate, pursue their passions, to share their talents with the world.
Minimum wage. Maximum people reached, maximum product produced, maximum profits earned.
And meanwhile, landfills pile higher. Trucks, planes, and cars belch carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Workers strain our healthcare system — overworked and undernourished. All in the name of efficiency.
There’s another not-so-hidden cost to efficiency: Joy.
When I think back to the most efficient times in my life, they were inarguably also the worst times of my life.
After our trip to Costa Rica, I hurled myself back into my fast-paced, efficient American schedule. In high school, I played three sports, participated in clubs, and spent most of my so-called “spare time” doing the three to four daily hours of homework, weekends included, that a “top-notch” education requires. I prided myself on fitting it all in and still getting to bed by 10 p.m.
There were the social challenges, bodily changes and fights with my parents, and dark moods that descended like swarms of flies — but I had no time to process any of it because layered on top of the difficulty of merely existing as a teenager were looming AP exams and varsity basketball tryouts and final papers and mountains upon mountains of homework that piled up as fast as I could paw away at them.
Fast forward 15 years and I found myself working full-time while caring for a baby who was not yet three months old. I was thrust into a life where suddenly every minute of every day was accounted for by someone else. I jogged with a stroller, cooked with an Ergo, pumped with a laptop perched on my knees.
I was a model of efficiency, and I was miserable. Every day a series of tasks, every night a blur of feedings.
Babies, after all, are notoriously inefficient. While on parental leave, I delighted in the inefficiency, in the long stretches of time spent making faces at my baby, staring at the wall during nursing sessions, dozing in the early afternoon, and sometimes just sitting with the swirl of emotions that ranged from aching love to blinding fear.
When I went back to work, there was no time for any of that. Everything became drudgery. But that’s how it has to be, they say. Parental leave must be efficient. And in the name of efficiency, it also cannot be paid.
At the end of the day, if saving time isn’t creating more joy in our lives, why are we all buying into the false narrative that efficiency is, by default, making our lives better?
Are we happier? Are we spending more time with the people we love? Are we making more time for our community?
The answers to all these questions for me are a resounding NO.
Like a newborn baby, joy is inherently inefficient.
I run for exercise, but I walk for joy. I sit on a beach doing nothing because I can lose myself in the expanse of ocean, whether it’s a blinding Caribbean blue or a churning Pacific Northwest gray.
I wander the neighborhood with my children and no particular destination because it creates space for real conversations that go beyond barking orders and protests. Sometimes we walk to our farmer’s market, even though I’ve already done my weekly grocery shopping, to buy strawberries that cost more and rot faster. We buy them because they taste like summer. It’s hard to believe they even share the same name as those bland, pithy monstrosities sealed in plastic at the grocery store.
Usually, the entire pint of strawberries is gone before we get home, our mouths are smeared with juice, and the smiles on my children’s faces remind me, yet again, how much we have over-complicated pretty much everything.
All in the name of efficiency.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.