Why do we have to be so efficient?
Imagine what life might be like with no one endlessly yammering on about maximizing your time
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“The trail was designed to have no end, a wild place on which to be comfortably lost for as long as one desired.”— Ben Montgomery, Grandma Gatewood’s Walk
Good things take time to do or make or finish. Good things like art, ideas, and the planting of a halfway decent garden take hard work and patience.
In this age of ultra-productivity, technology holds the threat and promise of getting us to the end without bothering to go through the important steps of the journey. This is an empty, pointless endeavor. Some people are in the business of optimizing every moment of their waking lives. I’m not one of them.
I like a slow burn. I like a meandering trail. I like to let the hours and days and weeks trickle by without worrying too much about what I have or haven’t accomplished. I like to get things done, but I’m okay with doing them slowly. After all, faster isn’t always better.
Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us of this when describing the purpose of nuts (the kind you find in trees) in her luminous book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. She writes:
“Nuts are designed to be brought inside, to save for later in a chipmunk’s cache, or in the root cellar of an Oklahoma cabin. In the way of all hoards, some will surely be forgotten — and then a tree is born.”
You can’t force a tree to grow faster than it wants to grow or maybe you can — I don’t know anything about tree cultivation. But I do know that the trees that grow fast tend to be weaker than slower-growing trees. Slow growth gives a tree time to dig its roots deeply into the ground. It gives the tree access to more nutrients which makes the tree stronger. That’s the tree I want to sit beneath.
What can be done about our national fixation on being as productive, as fast, as useful as possible? I have some thoughts.
Wake up early because you’re a morning person, not because you want to jam in an hour of exercise, meditation, or journaling before your “real” work begins. By all means, do these things if you want to. Don’t do them because a self-appointed productivity guru says they simply must be done for you to succeed.
Wake up early or wake up late. Don’t jump into the doing. Wait until the sun is high and bright and the productivity gurus are too distracted to make you feel bad about starting your day at 10 am.
Wake up — at whatever time — to feed the animals and take the dog outside.
Don’t rush the dog. Let him snuffle around the yard at his own pace. Let him bury his face in a patch of grass that smells very interesting. Let him pee three or four times, marking his place in the world.
You have to get back to a client. You have to call the IRS about that damn notice you got. You have to schedule a doctor’s appointment.
So what? When you feel yourself getting impatient, take a long slow breath. See how the dog doesn’t rush his business? Try not to envy his freedom, but learn from it. Fifteen minutes of wandering around your yard won’t make much of a difference to your day, but it means a lot to the dog. Let him take his time. Tell him he’s a good boy.
Make the coffee, get a handful of birdseed, and park yourself on the porch. Spread the birdseed on the railing, then sit down to do the day’s Wordle. Don’t make a task list. In fact, set fire to the task list (metaphorically). Picture it as a blazing inferno in your mind.
You have your Trello board and your inbox and your Asana notifications. Do you really need a bullet journal?
Who’s writing these rules? Why do we have to be so efficient? Why can’t we sit on the porch and watch the birds and worry about email when we’re good and ready to sit down to work?
Well, now you’re irritable.
Focus on the Black-capped Chickadee making all that noise in the Yew tree. Imagine, briefly, what it must be like to have no email and no to do lists and no one endlessly yammering on about maximizing your time.
You are simply a tiny chickadee, sitting in a Yew tree, hungrily eyeing a pile of sunflower seeds. There is nothing more to do than zip onto the railing, grab a seed, eat the seed, then grab another.
Admire the bird for being a bird.
Time un-optimization takes practice. If you’re self-employed, it can take years of unlearning the so-called rules of productivity.
For example, don’t schedule free time — just take it.
Don’t set up an autoresponder letting people know you’re away — just leave. You’ll respond when you return.
Don’t be seduced by the sweet promise of feeling busy, of sending and receiving emails, of creating unnecessary reports, of checking in and then checking in again.
Do the work, send the work, then step away from the work. Never (and this is incredibly important for time un-optimization) rush the dog. Don’t make excuses for taking naps. Do take a 60-minute midday break to kill zombies on your PS4.
Start your week on a Sunday. End it on a Thursday. If you’re self-employed, like me, this is a privilege. Exercise it.
Stop beating yourself up for un-living up to other people’s expectations. Today might be a spectacularly unproductive day. That doesn’t make you a failure.
Sitting on the couch binge-watching Ted Lasso is good for your soul. Not everyone can optimize their success or streamline their schedule or drag their tired bones to the gym 6 days a week.
Some of us need to leave long pauses in between hours and days and weeks because that’s how we make space for grief. That’s how we have time to remember a lost child. That’s the only way we can fortify our hearts.
Walking slowly along a wooded trail won’t prepare you to run a marathon, but it keeps your joints oiled. It keeps your heart strong. It keeps you connected to what’s really important.
Make sure you take the dog.
Let him stick his nose in a patch of ferns. Lift him over that fallen tree. Stop often to let him drink. Talk to him as if he can understand you. Take twice as long to get through the winding 3.4 miles of trail than you think you should. If you’re lucky, you might see a Blackpoll Warbler or a snapping turtle or a rat snake.
Blackpoll Warblers migrate over 6000 miles one way, starting in western North America and flying for days until they reach the Amazon basin. Now that’s what I call optimizing your time.
You’ll never be as efficient as that warbler, which is exactly why you shouldn’t worry about the email sitting in your inbox or the laundry that needs rotating or the clutter of papers on the dining room table.
Get to it after your walk. Or, better yet, get to it tomorrow. Let someone else do the winning.
Let the dog meander along the trail at his own pace. Redirect him when he heads toward a patch of poison ivy.
Despite what you’ve been told, the good life isn’t all about being efficient. It’s not about getting ahead. It’s definitely not about bullet journals and obsessively exploring your potential. This is the religion of burnout, of relentless productivity, of “personal growth.”
If you want to un-optimize your time, you must reject this religion.
Discover a new band. Listen to a podcast while gardening. Learn how to paint with watercolor. Take a year to read a book.
For god’s sake, lower your expectations. Wake up early because you want to or sleep late because you can. Play music while you cook. Call an old friend and let the conversation run on for hours. Make yourself breakfast or lunch or a personal charcuterie platter.
Allow the minutes to bleed into hours while you do something that isn’t work.
Imagine that time is endless and there are no markers to tell you when or how or why you should do something.
Practice listening to someone — really listening — to what they’re saying without waiting until they get to the end. In fact, stop worrying about beginnings or endings. It’s all one long middle anyway.
Take today off. Discover a new trail. Sharpen the kitchen knives. Learn the names of all the trees in your yard. And, remember, never rush the dog. He knows more than any guru about how to savor and maximize every scrap of time.
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