Rule #23: Be inefficient on purpose

Learn to be time rich instead of time poor

What activity in your life earns your undivided time? Do you even have one anymore?
There is so much cultural and technological pressure to do as many things as possible as fast as possible that even the idea of doing one thing at a time on purpose now feels strange.

I say be inefficient on purpose. Deliberately do things slowly, and with your full attention. Why? Consider these phrases as if they were on your headstone:

• ”Here lies an efficient father”

• “He was an efficient lover”

• “She was an efficient lawyer”

• “They lived an efficient life”

My point is that efficiency alone is never the goal. It’s a means to some other ends. And what should that end be? I’d say it’s probably something that involved a surplus of time. Where the goal was not to optimize but to enjoy, savor, linger or indulge. Of a great friend, we might say “he always made time for me.” But how did he make it? What magic did he use? There was no magic. It was simply a question of priorities. He gave you time in an inefficient way relative to other ways he could have used it. Love is inefficient. Generosity is inefficient. Many of the great things we hope to get in life are too.

Instead, in the name of efficiency, or productivity, we try to do too many things and get lost trying to optimize them all. We think we are saving time into some kind of time bank that we can withdraw from in the future but there is no such thing! We only ever get the present moment. And we can be so addicted to optimizing and multi-tasking, all the while gleefully telling ourselves “I can’t believe how much time I’m saving right now!” never noticing how the time payoff we desire is like a mirage, always out on the horizon. Always in the future. We forget we have to decide, today, right now, to spend a surplus of time on what matters most to get the reward we’ve been working so hard to get.

Part of the problem is the cult of busyness. Our culture rewards us with status for never having time for things. We admire busy people. We assume they are more important than people who have a surplus of time (who we call lazy). For example, when we see a silly video on social media, we often judge the creator by saying, “Well, that’s someone with too much time on their hands.” This is just Puritanical bullshit; a sad, warped, work ethic that only values capitalistic production. That person in the silly video was having fun. How often do we do that? Isn’t that the goal of all the work we do? To “make time” to, you know, enjoy life?

One measure of a good life is to be time rich. To make decisions so that you have all the time you want for the important things you choose. This is rare. It requires focus, autonomy and commitment. Instead most of us get lost in the cult of busy and live lives that are time poor. We always feel late and rushed. We feel we are behind and not doing enough, despite working as hard as we can. Surprisingly some financially wealthy people are among the most time poor of all. They’ve lost the plot. They’ve become so busy with their money they’ve forgotten how to live.