The Inefficiency of Efficiency

Efficiency is good, right? Companies of all kinds tout their efficiency. Logistics companies get things delivered quickly. Appliance companies build units to efficiently use energy. Emergency rooms brag about their “short” wait times. Everyone wants efficiency and everyone claims they have it, but even if it appears that way on the outside, we know what’s going on inside these companies. Efficiency only rewards the inefficient while punishing the efficient, whose very efficiency is the cause of their inefficiency.

Now that we’ve re-read that efficient sentence seven or eight times, let’s explore some examples.

Phone and Video Calls

You have a call at 9 a.m. so you dial in at 8:58 to make sure you’re on time without having to endure too much conference-call small talk. You’re alone. Or waiting for the host to let you in. Or staring at one person you barely know, hoping that person doesn’t address you while you wait for the 94 other essential members of the call. Your timeliness is efficient and surely everyone else will have the same mindset: let’s start this thing at the scheduled time and end it as soon as all essential information is gleaned.

Instead, you’re still staring at the screen at 9:03 a.m. while the host says, “We’ll wait a couple minutes to let everyone else join.” Those couple minutes go by and people trickle in, each requiring additional time to insincerely apologize for being late. By the time the call starts (9:12 a.m.), your efficiency has cost you 14 minutes of your life.

CC Me on That

It’s not enough to do one’s job anymore. Now, you need to copy your boss (to prove you’re working), your underling (sham training exercise), your six colleagues to whom you might briefly mention this at some point in the distant future (doesn’t hurt to give background), your dentist (because you mentioned this project during dental-office small talk last week) and your personal email address just in case the work servers shut down and you need to access this crucial email at 11 p.m. on Saturday.

Inevitably, you forget to copy someone at first, then send another email with the very helpful “+ Sue” and then feel like you’ve completed your job for the day. That false feeling of accomplishment soon disappears as every person you copied chimes in with unsolicited inane feedback or, worse, “Thanks!”

What you’ve done is create an email vortex of people proving they’re working by replying to an email. Only one person doesn’t reply: the recipient, i.e. the only person you need to reply. Had you sent the email to the real recipient and no one else, thus avoiding the inbox clogged with nonsense, you likely would’ve received a quick reply and accomplished your task. Instead, nothing happens aside from your boss gaining respect for your uninvolved colleagues who said “Thanks!”

Planning to React

Naturally, when you have some kind of event coming up, whether a client presentation or full-scale extravaganza or even something as mundane as a simple meeting, your tendency toward efficiency has you spending time planning for the event.

For the sake of using an example, let’s call it a company picnic. You prepare everything you need. Inform everyone who needs to be informed. Everything is finalized weeks in advance and you’re ready. Then, the day before (or morning of) the event, your inbox is stuffed with hastily written reply-all messages trying to change every detail of the thing. And, because they’re hastily written, everyone in the company is copied, misunderstandings occur and the “conversation” deviates into whatever the misunderstanding is. Because of the looming event, tensions get high between at least two of your colleagues who begin throwing personal insults at each other while still replying all.

After all that, with every suggested change canceling out every other suggested change, the event goes on exactly as you planned it aside from two things: (1) the whole thing is now your boss’s idea and (2) you had to buy more napkins because Dylan, the first-week intern who was copied on the email, was unsure if what you had would be enough (your boss’s boss liked the initiative and replied “gr8 idea thx,” which your boss interpreted as a top-priority directive and replied all while addressing you, “Hey! Can you go get another case of napkins ASAP! Per below! Thanks Dylan for the idea!!!”).

Instead of being efficient and spending all that time planning, you could’ve taken a vacation.

The Efficiency of Inefficiency

Every time you attempt to be efficient, you end up with another huge chunk of wasted time while the inefficient show up late, prove their worth by saying “thanks” to something that doesn’t pertain to them and taking credit for your company picnic. Plus, they get all these perks while doing whatever they want with their time. They take the vacations you don’t take, fake the illnesses you actually have, disrespect your time while you respect theirs and end up with raises.

What do you get? Self-respect. Maybe.

It appears the true key to efficiency is egregious inefficiency. If you’d like to discuss further, we can meet at the company picnic. It starts at noon so I’ll be there at 11:58. See you at 1:30.