The Efficiency Paradox

In this episode we reflect on Oliver Burkeman’s recent column, Escaping the Efficiency Trap - And Finding Some Piece of Mind and the paradoxical reality that the relentless pursuit of efficiency in our jobs and lives often leads to chronic inefficiency.


People, products and links mentioned in this episode:

• Coach Bobby Bowden dies at 91
• Sisyphus
• Escaping the Efficiency Trap and Finding Some Peace of Mind by Oliver Burkeman
• Pomodoro Timers and Eisenhower Box techniques:
  • Chasing Productivity & Creativity in WFH
  • Focus Matrix and BeFocused Apps
• Past Reflections on Structure
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• Conflicted podcast
• David Sparks (aka MacSparky) and "moving the needle"

Come visit us at busynessparadox.com to see episode transcripts,  blog posts and other content while you’re there!

Transcript

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Frank Butler  0:17  
Hello Busybodies, welcome to another episode of the Busyness Paradox. I'm Frank Butler here with Paul Harvey.

Paul Harvey  0:23  
Good day, Frank. And hey, before you tell the listeners what we're going to be talking about today, I'm going to call an audible here, a fitting play on words, because I just wanted to mention that pay respects to coach Bobby Bowden who passed away a couple days ago, as we're recording this. On August 8, my birthday died at the age of 91. Yeah, pancreatic cancer, very inspirational role model of leadership that I figured we should. Obviously, we're fans, both being Florida State graduates, but if you look at all the the media coverage, and the athletes and media personalities that are weighing in on him, you know, it's clear that he was well liked and earned a lot of people's respect over the years.

Frank Butler  1:05  
Yeah, no doubt

Paul Harvey  1:06  
He had one...well, he had a lot of quotes that are, you know, good quotes, but I found one that I thought really fit. And he said, I learned a long time ago that you don't have to go around using bad language and trying to hurt people to show how mature you are, that stuff won't get you anywhere. It just shows a lack of vocabulary and character.

Frank Butler  1:24  
How about that 

Paul Harvey  1:25  
Something for those of us in management positions to keep in mind

Frank Butler  1:28  
Yeah, he was a legend. You know, it's certainly a big loss, at least his legacy will certainly live on. And at least his legacy also wasn't tarnished by anything near the end of his career, either.

Paul Harvey  1:41  
Yeah. 

Frank Butler  1:41  
So 

Paul Harvey  1:42  
Thank God for that. That would almost be like, Mr. Rogers, or something getting taken down by a scandal like "No, I just I cannot handle it."

Frank Butler  1:50  
Nope. Wouldn't be able to handle it, right? That's right. 

Paul Harvey  1:54  
So I just wanted to mention that. 

Frank Butler  1:55  
Yeah. No, I'm glad you you took that moment in there. And with that segue, now, we're gonna talk about something that we love to talk about. And that's busyness. 

Paul Harvey  2:09  
Busyness. We've mentioned that before, I think,

Frank Butler  2:11  
Yeah, I mean, it’s come up a time or two, I think it's even the name 

Paul Harvey  2:14  
It is even in the name, you're right.

Frank Butler  2:16  
But in this particular context, we're going to focus in on what's been coined the efficiency trap, and how trying to find means of being too productive or using these time management and productivity tricks can actually lead to greater busyness, which ultimately means that you never exit the state of busyness. In this pursuit of smoothness, 

Paul Harvey  2:41  
Smoothness. I like it.

Frank Butler  2:42  
And getting things done

Paul Harvey  2:43  
It's trying to achieve a state where you're not busy at all, where everything in your life is just running like a smoothly oiled machine tends to be. What's a good analogy for that. Sisyphus, our good friend Sisyphus comes to mind. And in fact, a guy who we're going to shamelessly rip off a lot of his work for this episode, Oliver Berkman, he put it in those terms once in the context of email. And he was talking about the whole Inbox Zero thing and being super fast and efficient with email responses. And he said, you know, the stream of stream of incoming emails is endless. So this type of productivity tool can never bring liberation, you're still Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up the hill for all eternity, you're just rolling it a little bit faster. And that's the...that's the efficiency trap that you're just doing the busy work faster. And so you're doing more of it, because you're able to.

Frank Butler  3:36  
Yeah, it's it's wild. Now, as Paul had mentioned, a lot of this kind of triggered from an article that we saw in the Wall Street Journal that was called "Escaping the Efficiency Trap and Finding Some Peace of Mind" by actually Oliver Berkman. And really what he was doing, he was, I guess, setting up his new book that just came out here in the US, and it's rolling out across the globe right now called "4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" by Oliver Berkman. And, and we haven't read the book, it literally just dropped this week. And it just was fascinating that this happened to coincide. Because this is something that we talk about quite a bit. And one of the things that he mentioned was the Pomodoro Technique. We have mentioned that before. And there are certainly a lot of benefits to things like the Pomodoro Technique, but you can't pigeonhole everything into using these types of techniques, you do have to give flexibility to the way you manage your time. You know, if you're in the zone on something, why would you cut it off at the end of 15 minutes.

Paul Harvey  4:37  
So we might want to just for those who aren't aware, the Pomodoro Technique is a time blocking technique where you focus on a task for a set amount of time, usually 25 minutes is common, but some people do an hour, 15 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever. And then after that time block, you have a break period of however many minutes you want. So that pomodoro time technique, Italian for not onion, tomato, I guess, something to do with it, tomato timer or something and they use in Italy. But that's the idea is like you set a timer for a certain amount of minutes goes "Ding!" you stop what you're doing just stop and take a break, and then come back and do it again, or whatever. So that's what the Pomodoro Technique is, it's a way of structuring your time so that you don't fry your cognitive circuits, and allows you, in theory, and it works pretty well. I've tried it to stay kind of more focused without overdoing it. So that's what we mean by the Pomodoro Technique. 

Frank Butler  5:36  
Right? 

Paul Harvey  5:37  
And like Frank said, you can't...not everything works that way.

Frank Butler  5:41  
Yeah. Right. Exactly. It's not, it's something that applies to all contexts very well. It's, it's one of those things that if you overly rely on to any one of these techniques, it certainly can cause a lot of challenges. Now, I think that the Pomodoro technique where it's beneficial, is getting you into the zone, quite honestly, it's like, “Hey, I'm designating this time, I'm going to sit down and start doing this. That's it.” And I think that's really good, because it's like, okay, now he gets you in the right mindset. And maybe you know, that first 15 minutes, you take that break, because now you're sort of getting in the groove. But you're not quite there, you give yourself a moment to sort of reset, and then you go back into again, you might find that you're hitting your stride, though that second go, you just want to run with it for a little while. And while I get the idea of the 15 minutes on, or the 30 minutes on, or whatever, and then however many minutes off, I don't think it's necessarily always ideal, because I don't think we always work so segmented in our own minds, right?

Paul Harvey  6:41  
Some of our tasks, usually, for any given job, you'll probably have some tasks that fit well, very well into that kind of structure. And some of the don't. The irony or paradox here is that over reliance on these types of productivity and efficiency techniques, makes those more easily structured jobs kind of rise up bubble to the top of your to do list because these are, I can manage these with my new system, that's great. But those are often not the really interesting fulfilling parts of your job tends to be the more you know, the things that require a real deep dive, tend to be the more kind of fulfilling and interesting tasks that you're you're doing. those tend to be the ones that don't fit a lot of these different task management techniques. And so they get kind of pushed aside, which is the opposite of what we want.

Frank Butler  7:37  
Right

Paul Harvey  7:38  
So we get really good at doing emails and filing our paperwork and filling out forms. But we focus less on, you know, navigating a merger and acquisition or whatever your job might be something that's going to take a lot of time and is not going to be something you can structure. 

Frank Butler  7:56  
Yeah

Paul Harvey  7:57  
That's probably what you're actually getting paid to do. But it's often less structured.

Frank Butler  8:02  
You know, and going off that, too. That's one of the challenges that you face is that a lot of these jobs are unstructured, inherently, you have a sort of boundary as to what you're supposed to be doing. But it's hard to put structure around something that doesn't necessarily always have structure. Meaning a sales job, for example, is not really just about making that phone call and spending 30 minutes with them, right? You have to sometimes spend more time with one client versus another. Or it depends on how often you've been working with that client. If it's an old client, you've worked with it a long time. That's a different conversation and takes different amount of time than somebody new, who you don't know and they don't know you, and you're trying to create that relationship.

Paul Harvey  8:47  
Right. And so what all this stuff is, be it the Pomodoro Technique, or the Eisenhower box that we've talked about before, the common thread of all of them, is they're mostly used to create structure for jobs that don't have a lot of structure.

Frank Butler  9:01  
Right. 

Paul Harvey  9:01  
And they can be used outside of the workplace also. So they're a structure-creating tool, which, as we often discuss, structure is a good thing to a point. 

Frank Butler  9:12  
Right. 

Paul Harvey  9:13  
The issue is when we become overly structured that we leave no space for creativity, or downtime, or unanticipated eventuality is, you know, things that you didn't foresee coming that Oh, no, you know, this big disaster happened at work. There's no place in my time block schedule for it. What do we do? That's where we have problems.

Frank Butler  9:34  
Yeah. And I think that Mr. Bergmann does a nice job of summarizing this down to the choice you can make is to stop believing you'll ever solve the challenge of business by cramming more in, which is what some of the stuff does, right by time blocking and stuff like that. You're adding more activities that are going to make you busier because you're in that pursuit of trying to get things done,

Paul Harvey  9:55  
Right. The getting things done philosophy, GTD Some listeners, I'm sure are familiar with this is basically what happens when you go too far with the Getting Things Done approach.

Frank Butler  10:07  
Right? And why do we feel like we have to do some of these things? Or why do we get annoyed by some of these activities that we have to do, but yet they take time away from other activities. And actually, this is something that really, I never really thought about until this article kind of brought it up. And the example that he used in here is that, you know, you can buy tickets to a concert on your phone or to the theater.

Paul Harvey  10:34  
He being Oliver Berkman

Frank Butler  10:36  
Yep, Oliver Berkman. Yeah, you know, you can buy these things on your phone or on the web. And real fast, real easy, you don't have to wait in any lines. But yet, there's so many things that you have to actually still wait in line to do, for example, voting. And that seems like it's an annoying process now, because of that very fact that you have these efficiency elements in one side of the equation. Why can't it be done on this side? And of course, you know, we can get into a whole debate as to why you have to vote in person. But the reality is that there aren't a lot of things that we see like that in today's environment. Sometimes that's just the way it is 

Paul Harvey  11:11  
Just the way it is. 

Frank Butler  11:12  
Does that make it rig t? No. But I mean, I've heard too often too, with people starting their new job somewhere, that they immediately, instead of trying to learn the way that it's been done, they really go well, I can already see better processes to do this. And you're like, Well, that's true. There are probably better ways. But why are they doing it in this manner, versus doing it the way you think it should be done? Because I can guarantee you're probably not the first person, right, think about a more efficient way. And I'm sure somebody did that efficient way. And there's a reason why they have that extra step or two in there. That takes a little extra time.

Paul Harvey  11:49  
That drives me crazy. I'm sure I've been guilty of it, too. Oh, I know. I just do it this way. Yeah. Well, if you'd been here a year ago, you would know that we tried it and it was a disaster because of x, y, & z which you don't know about yet? Because you just started here. So shut the heck up. 

Frank Butler  12:05  
Right. 

Paul Harvey  12:05  
Yeah. 

Frank Butler  12:06  
Right. I mean, there's always areas that there are room for improvement in so many different areas.

Paul Harvey  12:12  
Yeah. And sometimes the outsider does see something that no one else has thought of, because they're, they've got a fresh perspective. So I mean, yeah. 

Frank Butler  12:20  
But you got to understand the why they do it that way. First, before you can start bringing in that, well, what if you did it this way, we can solve the problem that way. 

Paul Harvey  12:29  
You know what's a great example of this? It just occurred to me, completely, almost completely, off topic. But there's a podcast that I recently discovered that's been out for several years now called Conflicted I think, conflict...conflicted. It's two guys. One is a, someone who grew up in the US had an evangelical, very kind of fire and brimstone sort of upbringing. And the other is a former member of al Qaeda. And he, you know, renounced his jihadist ways and was a spy for MI6 in London, in the UK for for a long time. And they basically go through everything that's been happening in the Middle East, since like, the Iranian Revolution or so. And basically explains why things are the way they are. And as it listen, you listen to it, like, Ah, so all the times when I said those fools, they should just do this are they being whoever, you know, the the US or the Arabs or the...this country, that country, Ohh...so that's why they did that, instead of...it's like every minute of the of the podcast, I'm just like, banging my head against the wall. Like, that makes a lot of sense now. It's not exactly a workplace context. But I do believe it's the greatest podcast I've ever heard. And I was kind of looking for an excuse to drop it anyway. Well, that, that gave me one. So there you go.

Frank Butler  13:57  
But I think that's that's the exact example. Right? It's institutional context. Yeah, you might have been doing it this way to another organization. We do it this way here. Here's why. You got to learn those ropes right before you start really making recommendations. But again, that all ties back to this idea of busyness. And the efficiency trap, always trying to find ways of doing things more efficiently or smoother or whatever, begets more busy work because what you're trying to do is go okay, I want to get this done. So I can do this. I want to get this done. So I can do this. Well, sometimes that's not the thing that makes the most sense and can actually yield the most issues.

Paul Harvey  14:35  
So make you feel like you're being productive because you're knocking things off the list, but I really moving the needle to...David Sparks, co-hosts (I'm dropping more podcasts Frank), a podcast called Focused and a couple others, Mac Power Users and Automators, and he likes to use this term "moving the needle", like you can do as busy work stuff that you feel good you're getting stuff done, but are moving the needle for whatever your job is, are you actually making progress towards the important stuff in your job in your life? I kind of like that way of thinking about it.

Frank Butler  15:09  
And I think that's critical, right? Is it really a function of your job? Are you moving the right needle? You sure could be checking things off a list. But are you getting the right things done?

Paul Harvey  15:19  
Mm hmm. Your year end evaluation or whatever, probably not gonna say, "Well, you know, you're really dropped the ball on this huge project you were leading, but boy, you know, you were cranking out 1000 emails a week, here's a raise." That's not gonna happen, probably. 

Frank Butler  15:35  
Nope, you're gonna get in trouble for that project not getting completed. Right. And, and I think that's that element that we get into here is sometimes you got to stop and smell the roses. If you have to go wait in line to go vote. Do it. It's not convenient. No, especially because there's that convenience idea of colonizing everyday life, which is that term? I mean, that's such a great mechanism of thinking about things. Why am I feeling this way? Why do I feel like I got to compartmentalize this into a time management technique? Or what have you? Well, you can't do that with everything. You gotta sometimes just take that moment, just realize, I gotta be flexible with certain activities. Now, there's certain things that time blocking is great for, there's certain things that, you know, an Eisenhower method is going to be great for all those kinds of things going on. But you've got to be flexible. And I think that's the criticality of everything is how do we remain flexible? How do we remain open minded? Not close off our mind going, Oh, this is stupid. So I'm not going to do it, because this is the way we have to do it. But I can do it this way. somewhere else.

Paul Harvey  16:43  
I always think when someone says "that's stupid," that means they're doing this. They're closing off, they're closing their mind and/or they don't know what they don't know. That's always a red flag. me. Sorry, to interupt.

Frank Butler  16:53  
Oh, yeah, no, you're right. You're right. But it's like, you know, voting right? Voting's super important. Just because you have to wait, it sucks. Yes, get it? No,

Paul Harvey  17:00  
I know, they do it online, in Findland or something. But things are different there, we'll get there someday, like, just do it. Like you said, sometimes it is the way it is.

Frank Butler  17:08  
Right. And that's what we're getting to hear in. That was the other element of it is that this idea of slack, you need to give yourself slack. While that time blocking technique does try to build in downtime, right? You have your sprint during those 15, 20, 30 minutes or whatever, you've got to create slack to allow yourself to not get flustered when something comes up that's unanticipated or unexpected, or to do things like wait in line, even though you're like, Oh my gosh, I don't have to wait in line doing this. Why do I have to do it here. That's why your time has to be flexible, and kind of give up that notion of Hey, or at least have the notion of saying hey, I can't control everything. So you just don't didn't get mad at yourself for not getting things done, right? Being able to understand that a lot of things are outside of your actual control. You have to rely on others.

Paul Harvey  18:00  
What's that Alcoholics Anonymous saying, like, give me the strength to control the things I can and not worry about the things I can't and to know the difference between those two, something like that.

Frank Butler  18:14  
You might know too much about that.

Paul Harvey  18:16  
I might. I got a problem. 

Frank Butler  18:19  
No, but that's I mean, that's valid, right? It's, there are so many things that people can get so bent out of shape about, and it's completely out of their control.

Paul Harvey  18:28  
And sort of ironically, the more slack, you build into your schedule, I think the less you start feeling that way, like "Arg! this traffic jam! This just can't be!" Like, what can I do about the fact I'm stuck in traffic? You can't do a damn thing. And if you had slack built into your schedule, you won't really be worried about it. Well, this is unfortunate, let's see what's on the radio. And to bring up David Sparks, again. The one who talked about moving the needle. he's a he's an advocate of time blocking and such. But his technique is to very first thing to plan into the upcoming week is slack time. And that could be just idle time that's like not assigned to any specific thing or family time or whatever. That goes in the schedule first. And then you build your work schedule around that. And I think that's a nice idea. Because then you will, you're basically coming as close as you can to guaranteeing you'll have some slack. And therefore, some, hopefully mental health built into your schedule.

Frank Butler  19:35  
You know, this is a complete aside to but since we like to do these, it really makes me think about this article that a colleague of mine sent me this morning, and it was about GE and six sigma. And many folks probably don't know that GE became probably the largest corporate backer of this Six Sigma idea and as a result of their implementation of it, it sort have led to this explosion of Six Sigma throughout, in his article talked about the rise and fall of Six Sigma

Paul Harvey  20:05  
Didn't they develop that? Was was that GE creation? Or did they adopt it

Frank Butler  20:09  
I think it was adopted, I think it was born out of like the Toyota Process Management System. Stuff like that makes sense. But basically, the whole key is it's a quality control element, right. And it's about reducing the number of defects on a line, where if you can get to a certain point, your defect rate super low. But the thing that happened is that six standard deviations,

Paul Harvey  20:30  
Six standard deviations from the mean? I think that's where Six Sigma comes from 

Frank Butler  20:34  
I think that's what it is. Yeah. And GE had implemented it and while it was initially in the manufacturing, they took it the next step and put it in every single part of the process of their business, your business is rather and it worked to a point. But there's a lot of applications at Six Sigma doesn't work. 

Oh, my God. Yes.

See now, if you look at GE, Six Sigma has definitely still used in the manufacturing side of things. But it is certainly no longer there is the term I saw and that was monotheistic, they're no longer physically attached to six sigma, because they know that it works in some areas, and it doesn't need to be applied everywhere. But basically, we've seen Six Sigma no longer be this sort of major thing that everybody has been talking about. It's sort of, I think, kind of retracted. Right, the swing of the pendulum. 

Paul Harvey  21:24  
Yes. 

Frank Butler  21:25  
Well, it's the same thing with with this idea is that, you know, the whole thing was six sigma is that it has a point where it's creates returns, but then it diminishes quite quickly in other areas. That's the same thing with time blocking 

Paul Harvey  21:36  
Basically meant for manufacturing, designed with manufacturing processes in mind. And then this is...I'm trying to like hold myself back, because I worked for a competitor of GE back about 20 years ago. And we lock, stock and barrel stole the idea of, well, I shouldn't say stolen...created, implemented our own process that was basically Six Sigma under a different name. And so I went through this where we saw how it was very successful on the shop floor, then had to move into the offices. And this job does not fit into this, like I don't have like measurable defects in my job. I'm like, I, you know, I was working in finance and quasi-accounting function like, I don't...this doesn't apply to my job and boy, you had to be certified level silver, gold, platinum. Man, the amount of hours that were tossed down that drain, and yeah, I could have told you then 20 years ago, when I was about 20, myself that this is not gonna...like 20 years from now we're going to be laughing about this. On something called a podcast. And here we are. 

Frank Butler  22:46  
Here we are. No. And I think that's just it, though. They think that with all of these types of things, time management techniques, this idea of Six Sigma, all these types of things you do really have to start considering. What does that really mean? And are we doing too much of it? Are we taking away...in the pursuit of perfection? I think is what it comes down to, right? That pursuit of perfection

Paul Harvey  23:11  
And perfection of what? 

Frank Butler  23:12  
Right

Paul Harvey  23:13  
Something like six sigma relies on measuring things. So you're talking about the types, the parts of your job, which are measurable, which if you're a quote-unquote, knowledge worker, there's not many of those. And the things that ARE measurable are not really the value add, so...the number of emails that you respond to...

Frank Butler  23:30  
But we also talked about being focused on output, right? So 

Paul Harvey  23:32  
we did 

Frank Butler  23:33  
There are certain elements that can be measurable, but I think the idea is, what's the defect in there, right?

Paul Harvey  23:39  
Right. 

Frank Butler  23:39  
If you're talking about a project management idea, and deliverables, is it customer satisfaction at that point? That's probably a great outcome to be looking at. Right? If you're trying to deliver a project for a client

Paul Harvey  23:50  
Oh I agree. 

Frank Butler  23:51  
And you're doing spot checks at a deliverable.

Paul Harvey  23:53  
Yeah, to the extent you can measure it. Absolutely. I wish we could quantify everything. But don't try to quantify and measure things that aren't quantifiable and measurable.

Frank Butler  24:03  
Right? So it's like, is the customer satisfied with the outcome of that report or that deliverable? That's where you're measuring. You're not necessarily measuring how many times they write a word in there. We're not going back to the days of what was it Herman Melville getting paid for every word that he wrote? I think it was, I think that's the story. I think we've had that conversation. But you know, that's the idea is that you got to incentivize the right things, or you got to encourage the right behaviors. So that's where I think we are right now 

Paul Harvey  24:28  
That's where we are, don't fall into that efficiency trap

Frank Butler  24:30  
Right, just realize that you there are things that are out of your control, don't get too hung up on efficiency, and always trying to pursue pure efficiency, because all that does is create more busyness for you 

Paul Harvey  24:40  
Be...INTO efficiency, but not OF efficiency. 

Frank Butler  24:43  
Yes. 

Paul Harvey  24:44  
I don't even know what that means.

Yeah, well, I like it 

Frank Butler  24:47  
Sounded smart. So I said it.

And on that note, folks, 

Paul Harvey  24:51  
Good day

Frank Butler  24:52  
Good day.

Paul Harvey  24:53  
The Busyness Paradox is distributed by Paul Harvey and Frank Butler. Our theme music is adapted from "It's Business Time" By Jemaine Clements and Brett McKenzie. Our production manager is Justin Wuntaek. We hope you enjoyed this episode, and we'd love to hear from you. Please send questions, comments, or ideas for future episode topics to input@busynessparadox.com or find us on Twitter. Also, be sure to visit our website, busynessparadox.com, to read our blog posts and for links to the articles and other resources mentioned in today's show. Finally, please take a moment to rate and follow or subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, I-Heart Radio, Google podcasts or your preferred podcast provider.

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