Like most people, I’ve adopted a level of efficiency as a survival mechanism. With three kids, a home, a career, a partner and friends, I strive for effectiveness so I can keep going without getting buried under it all. I eat leftovers, put things back where I found them, have a system for ordering groceries, do laundry in an organized fashion and clean as I go when I cook. There are definitely times and places for effectiveness.
But…
I am most content, creative, loving and fun to be around when efficiency is not front and center.
Last week I spent a few days with my boyfriend and his family. There were eighteen of us in a cabin near a lake in Minnesota. There were no schedules, no set plans. Everyone could eat or sleep when they wanted. For the most part, we all ate dinner together, but otherwise the food and fun were available when we craved it. Getting eighteen of us showered every day seems like it would be a nightmare, but it wasn’t. We each took a shower when a bathroom was open.
I had such a good time. A crowd like that could be daunting for an introvert, but it wasn’t. I was at ease. No one dictated what needed to be done. No one rushed or corrected anyone. We just worked with each other and enjoyed the time together.
This is not me.;)
The only time I felt pressure to perform more effectively was while playing corn hole (aka beanbag toss or bags). I was partnered with Boyfriend’s sister, who is an ace corn hole player. 🙂 My anxiety about being observed kicked in, but only in small doses. The encouragement and smiles from everyone quickly dissolved any worry.
Love efficiently?
I’ve been in romantic relationships where efficiency and productivity held more prominent roles than love and comfort. In those relationships there was a sense of being judged all the time. Was I cooking/cleaning/kissing correctly? Was I active enough? Intelligent enough? Practical enough?
It is hard to trust someone who is waiting for you to mess up. Without trust, there is no ease, no effortless joy. Love does not flow when we are afraid of being judged. With trust, we can make mistakes. We can be ourselves. We can feel real love.
The sad thing is, I believe those past loves felt they were only worthy of love if they ran a tight ship. If they managed everything well, they then deserved admiration and care.
Learning is not a business
Educating humans, for one, should be understood as inherently inefficient. That doesn’t mean you don’t want effective schools, but the measure of that effectiveness should not be speed, scale, or cost per unit. — Courtney E. Martin, I’m Suspicious of Efficiency and I’m Addicted to It
I believe a love of learning is the most solid foundation to a beneficial education. I hear so many kids say they hate school. That makes me sad. I’m generalizing, but I mostly see that crushed, de-spirited look in boys’ eyes when they talk about going to school. My sons research the heck out of a subject they personally find interesting, but schoolwork is a major effort. School curriculums require educators to stick to certain material to keep test scores high. The size of classes requires teachers to maximize their time, resources and efforts by minimizing personal attention.
I used to love it when a teacher would get off on a tangent about something other than the lesson. Personal stories from the teachers always made the material more digestible and memorable. Teachers today don’t have that luxury. Teaching restricted subjects to the masses involves efficiency. Efficiency does not often foster curiosity. That’s too bad, because curiosity often fosters learning.
Humanity: Not particularly efficient
I’ve found I’m not particularly efficient when it comes to writing. I know deadlines help me start and complete projects, but in between the start and finish is a process of resistance, release and creativity.
Creativity flows. It is not easily marshaled into submission. It develops naturally, organically. Like many elements of the human condition it has its own timeline.
Parenting is another endeavor with its roots more in empathy and patience than in efficiency and practicality. Just when we think we have the best new parenting tool to use with our kids, the kids show us they cannot be corrected or configured like a spreadsheet. They have hearts and minds wild with wonder and worry. They need us to listen not lecture. They need hugs not chore charts.
Efficiency + cornhole
Efficiency is not going to go away. We need effectiveness to get things done. Our culture requires it. It is not evil by any means but we spend so much time striving to run our lives in an orderly fashion, we miss opportunities to pause, love, learn and live. We miss our kids giggling at our lopsided pancakes and bed head. We miss chances to hug our kids through mistakes and build trust. We spend more time preparing our kids for the ACT than we do preparing them for relationships. We spend more time working out a shower schedule than we do enjoying a good game of cornhole.
Keep honing your efficiency but please play more cornhole.
Are you more efficient than loving? How has that affected your relationships?
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Hi Brenda,
This is a great post and it highlights something that I and a friend have been looking at for years now from our Steiner school background. Lets see if I can explain it well enough and then I hope you can relate it to what you have said:
There is a significant difference between an artistic/cultural/religious pursuit, such as education, and an economic one, i.e. business where you pay for product. The reality is that you actually cannot pay someone to educate your children. It just does not make sense. Sure, you can pay them for ‘body’ time, i.e. being at a school. But after that the education they provide is given from their own free will. Actually this is the same in ANY knowledge work (like my programming). You cannot pay someone to think specific thoughts or even be motivated. Money has been proven to be only a negative motivator, i.e. not having enough is a negative motivation.
Thus there is a gap between the money provided for education and the service provided. You are NOT paying for the service. You cannot. You can only pay for the people to be there. Otherwise they are slaves, though even if they were you could not actually pay for them to think a certain way.
This gap mirrors the reverse one for me. Where we give a child an education, but it is up to their own free choice as to what job, if any, they wish to do. Society then relies on the numbers for it to work. It would be wholly unethical to take a newborn, do some sophisticated brain scan and then say: This child will be a teacher, or a programmer, or whatever, so we will provide an education for that and then the person will be forced to provide that service to society.
Just imagine what that would mean.
So in short. Money and certain artistic, cultural, spiritual and knowledge pursuits cannot be paid for. They actually live in a different world from the one where money can buy products.
To me this is where the thinking goes wrong and so we suffer the consequences.
Well. I do hope that makes sense! It is still work in progress for me so many thanks for your post helping me on my path to understanding it better.
All the best
Charles
PS: I think I feel a blog post coming though I did touch on it here https://charlestolman.com/2014/10/28/my-thinking-is-not-for-sale and here https://charlestolman.com/2016/02/27/study-diaries-misplacing-egotism
You’ve got me thinking Charles. Thank you! Perhaps we have misplaced our internal motivation in the economic realm. A Steiner education must have been interesting… Thanks for sharing your thoughts. They definitely piqued my interest.
“we spend so much time striving to run our lives in an orderly fashion, we miss opportunities to pause, love, learn and live”
Hmmm. This is something my SO and I were talking about recently. In particular how it can affect me, doubling down with the intensity I often bring to things I am doing. It’s something I hadn’t noticed before, and this is the second reminder this week. And as I write this, I am right now heading off for some shared time, to disconnect from my schedule and connect into the unwind path for a few hours. Nice post, thank you.
Enjoy the time away from your schedule! Glad you are taking the time to pause.:)
Being human, really human, isn’t efficient. No. It’s chaotic. It’s up and down and all over the map. It’s like nature … of all things. It’s like the universe. Some predictability to it … but only within certain wide ranges.
And the chaos of life can destroy at any given moment … and it creates anew.
Education today saps the human out of learning. It destroys the learning and creative spirits, which are crucial to really living.
What do we strive to be so efficient for? To do more stuff? have more stuff? be more productive? achieve more? be successful by someone else’s definition?
The stuff and the achievements and success — success defined “out there” somewhere — it ain’t all that great.
Do we love easily? Laugh easily and often, every day? Are we free of judging? Do we see beauty everywhere and in everyone? Then … then I think we begin to live.
I like being messy and chaotic and hot and cold and excited and all the different emotions. All of our emotions are our friends, if we love them, and talk to them, and be with them.
Efficiency? That’s fear-based, I suppose. ‘What if we don’t get it all done?’
What if we don’t? What if we’re laughing and loving and creating and exciting instead? What might happen then? What if we let go of efficiency … and we laugh and love and create and wonder? What might happen?
Two very different paths … I like the laughing loving creating path …! I know you do, too, Brenda!
Thank you for a very provocative note this week. You touched on a LOT!
Great point about striving to be efficient so we can do more stuff. Yikes! That doesn’t sound fun, exciting or fulfilling, just busy. The problem is we get sucked into the patterns everyone else is following and it feels really uncomfortable to exit the patterns, but I’m learning more and more that it’s worth the initial discomfort. That freedom and real joy, are what make me want to get up each day. I know you understand that kind of joy Michael. Thanks for sharing your ever-wise insight.