Efficiency is Not the Greatest Good

“When efficiency becomes the organizing virtue of a creative practice, or even a life, it crowds out the things efficiency can’t measure. Stick efficiency vs. creativity in the ring together, and efficiency will come out on top every time.”

May was an unusually slow month for me.

I love the household ritual of erasing the large whiteboard calendar in my kitchen and surveying the month ahead in all of its erasable glory. But when I saw how empty May was, I was mildly disappointed. I genuinely like having things to do, and a kind of restlessness tends to settle in whenever I’m home for too many evenings in a row. (Can you tell that I’m an eldest daughter?)

Now, at the beginning of June, I’m looking back rather pleased with what actually happened. The space in my schedule let other interests grow up in the gaps—planting a garden, picking up cross-stitching, starting a sourdough starter, going to the gym again, reconnecting with old friends. These weren’t things I’d scheduled or planned for; they surfaced once there was room for them.

Boredom has become an unfamiliar feeling to me, and I’m starting to think that’s a problem. A fully-packed life rarely makes room for questions like, “Well, what should I do now?” When efficiency rules as your organizing virtue, questions of craft & creativity never quite make it onto the calendar.

Meet Burnout’s Little Sister

By now, we’re all quite familiar with burnout. It has its own vocabulary, with entire TED talks and diagnostic checklists to boot. I’ve been trying to find a name for the stage that comes before burnout—that’s what I think I was living in for the past few months. 

I wasn’t burned out. Certainly not unhappy, not even particularly stressed—just sealed off from my own curiosity. Occupied, but not quite alive to what I was doing. 

Let’s call it “bog-out”: the slow, accumulating effect of a life so efficiently filled that there’s never any reason to ask whether you’re filling it with the right things.

Unlike burnout, bog-out doesn’t get in the way of getting stuff done. There’s no overt exhaustion or resentment—by external measure, things are going well. But the part of you that wonders, experiments, and gets interested in things for no particular reason has wandered off and fallen asleep under a tree somewhere. 

Efficiency, pushed far enough, produces this.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I don’t think the answer is to abandon efficiency altogether, or even to treat it with suspicion. The same quality that produces creative bog-out is also, in the right doses, what makes creative work actually useful and deliverable. The tension lives in finding the right dosage for the patient.

A Tale of Two Locksmiths

Last month, my husband and I got a new car. He ordered a second key fob off Amazon (significantly cheaper than the dealership), and we searched for a locksmith to program it.

The first locksmith I contacted declined the project. The Amazon fob, he explained, was cheaply made. He had standards. He didn’t work with inferior parts that could potentially damage his machine or my car.

So we called a second locksmith, and he programmed the fob without incident. 

In the process of writing this post, I kept coming back to those two locksmiths. I’m less interested in which one was “right” and more in identifying the distinct philosophies they were each operating from—efficiency vs. creativity. The first locksmith drew a line around quality of craft and held it; the second met us where we were, within the realities of our budget and situation.

At Amenable, we revisit the tension between those two positions constantly, because while both locksmiths had perspectives that made sense, only one of them ended up with a job that day.

Our clients almost always come to us with limited resources and pending deadlines. Respecting those constraints is itself a form of respect for the people behind them. A small nonprofit that has scraped together a budget for a rebrand deserves a partner who works skillfully within that reality, not one who lectures them about the resources that they should ideally have at their disposal.

And yet, craft resists efficiency by nature. A good idea needs room to turn around in. Design requires iteration. Strategy often needs the discomfort of sitting with a problem long enough to find the right solution rather than the fast one. A team that optimizes purely for output, treating every project as something to be completed rather than something to be crafted, eventually loses the very thing that made their expertise worth hiring in the first place. 

Seeking a False Summit

I wrote a few months ago that clarity is not the greatest good—our industry’s hunger for brand clarity, when pushed to its logical extreme, produces something so shiny it’s forgettable. Efficiency, I think, is the same kind of false summit.

It’s not that efficiency is bad—it’s a valuable lubricant in the gears of any functional team. Efficiency reduces unnecessary friction, respects everyone’s time, and creates margin where there wasn’t any. But when efficiency becomes the organizing virtue of a creative practice, or even a life, it crowds out the things efficiency can’t measure. Stick efficiency vs. creativity in the ring together, and efficiency will come out on top every time.

A creative practice runs on things that efficiency can’t comprehend: the idea that arrived halfway through a walk, the conversation between two coworkers lingering at the coffee machine, and the design direction that emerged from the ashes of its rejected predecessors. Through the lens of efficiency, these things look like waste, but every creative knows that real work happens there, too. The pressure to show progress, hit deadlines, and justify every hour can unknowingly push those valuable, yet immeasurable things off the calendar.

Efficiency vs. Creativity: What’s Worth Preserving?

What we’re after, at Amenable, is the discipline to protect those inefficient parts, because we recognize that those parts are load-bearing. The wandering, the iteration, and even the boredom create ideal conditions for creative work to bloom.

Yet, to return to our locksmiths, we must fight the urge to become too precious about our processes. No nonprofit has the patience or budget to wait for us to pursue the platonic ideal of a website. Just because our work is craft does not preclude it from also being, well, just work.

So where’s the right balance between efficiency vs. creativity? I’m still working that out. I think the answer has something to do with what you’re protecting craft for, and whether you’re protecting it for the client’s sake or for your own. The first locksmith’s standards may have been legitimate, but they failed to match the reality of the person standing in front of him. That’s the difference between principle and rigidity. (Sorry, Dale.)