The Efficiency Trap
Doing things in advance might save you time...or not.
For the past several months, I’ve been writing posts about time management for writers. The TLDR is that there is no One True System that will solve all your time management woes. Sometimes, the things we do because we think they will save us time just take up more time – but they make us look efficient and On Top of It.
Welcome to the Efficiency Trap
The efficiency trap goes like this. You come up with a system to help you stay on top of all the small tasks – like, maintaining inbox zero, a tidy calendar, and clean countertops – because if you can clear the decks of all the small tasks, you’ll finally have the mental clarity and focus to do the big tasks that really matter to you (like, writing your book).
What ends up happening instead is that the small tasks are Sisyphean. No matter how efficient you get at doing them, you’ll have to do them again. You’ll clean the countertops and two seconds later your toddler will spill juice everywhere. You’ll empty your inbox, and tomorrow it will be full of more Substack newsletters. Additionally, if you work in any kind of collaborative environment, if you demonstrate that you are good at getting the small tasks done (like diligently filling out all the annoying and pointless paperwork) you will get a reputation for being efficient and On Top of It and so you will get tapped to take on more of the small tasks you don’t actually want to do and the big jobs you do want the time and energy for…the time just never seems to manifest.1
The Liberty and Tyranny of Batch Baking
Meal prepping is a classic example of the efficiency trap. For the uninitiated, meal-prepping is the idea of either cooking a bunch of meals on the weekend or doing several hours of mise en place so that weeknight meals come together more quickly. It is often marketed as a time saver, but meal prepping doesn’t actually save you any time or labor, it just re-arranges the labor to be on a day (Saturday or Sunday) when you might have more energy than typical weeknight dinner time.
Sometimes, I have the time/ energy on a weekend to cook several meals in advance so that all I have to do for the rest of the week is re-heat. It's great when that happens, but sometimes, I'd rather use my weekend to relax and not do hours of work just so that I can do different work during the week. Frozen pizza is a great option that actually saves me time and energy!
Batch-baking work can also apply to other types of work – such as writing or grading. Sometimes, batching substack posts and writing a bunch at once and scheduling in advance is super helpful because it means I can have several week periods where substack is mostly on autopilot. (Like now! Most of my January posts were written on a snow day at the beginning of the month and then scheduled out.)
Other times, the time I need to "batch bake" isn't there...but I do have pockets of time (at the last minute) where I can write my post for the week. Sometimes, only having a short amount of time means I will work faster and more efficiently than when I have a long chunk of time.
How Do You Escape the Efficiency Trap?
Sometimes the strategies we use to make our work more efficient (like batch-baking) really do help. And other times, they don’t. The key is to be flexible and to periodically evaluate what is/ isn’t working. If something isn’t working, ditch it! Try something else!
The other crucial piece of escaping the efficiency trap is to think more critically about what you really need to do to function.
Do you need a perfectly tidy desk?
Do you need an empty and organized inbox?
Do you need stackable boxes of rainbow pre-chopped veggies in your fridge?
Maybe you do! But maybe, you don’t. Maybe you can get away with not doing the Sisyphean tasks daily but can instead do them weekly or monthly. Maybe you don’t need a system or a plan at all, and you’ll be just fine following your intuition and cognitive energy.
Maybe you can handle more chaos than you’ve let yourself believe.
For more on the efficiency trap, check out Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.
Oh, I so understand this. I've caught myself in the past doing too many housekeeping chores, whether around the house or within my digital spaces, often as an avoidance strategy, e.g. "I'll be able to write if the desk is clean." I'm more inclined now to batch those tasks--like catching up on Substack posts that I've been wanting to comment on, like yours. :)
When I first worked at Microsoft years ago and commuted by bus, I noticed how productive I became in the last 45 minutes of the day when I had the hard stop of the bus schedule. When I started working from home (long before COVID), I had to find ways to get into the same space.
I like to think nowadays in terms not of efficiency, but effectiveness. And sometimes effectiveness really does mean letting a bunch of other stuff slide or just get messy!
As for real batch-baking, my wife and I prep a lot of freezer meals, batching them up every few weeks. Her work often keeps her out later and the freezer meals make it easy for me to drop one (thawed) into the Instant Pot and quickly pull together veggies or simple sides. It's been working well.