Why Efficiency Fanatics Are Wasting Their Time

The general consensus is that modern life is speeding up (we even walk faster than years ago). With more and more to squeeze into our days both at home and at work, it's easy to see why efficiency experts get a hearing. Just arrange your life to eliminate wasted moments and you'll have more time to finish reports, take the kids to lessons or even catch up on your reading.

But as sensible as it sounds to move your printer closer to your desk or strategically arrange your belongings to get through airport security screening quicker, is there a fundamental flaw with the whole idea of upping your personal efficiency? On his blog, James Kwak, author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, lays out the case that fretting about these sort of small improvements in efficiency is probably counter-productive.

It's a long post and well worth a read in full, but the basic idea is this:

I've become very skeptical of the simple argument for efficiency studies.... The idea is that time has a monetary value (say, the per-hour employment costs of each employee), and if you save time, you save money. One example... is moving printers. It seems to make sense on its face. You spend time walking to and from the printer. Therefore, printers should be located to minimize the total time people spend in transit, which could mean moving the printer closer to the heavy users of printing. Then those people can spend more time at their desks being productive.

But there is a serious fallacy in this argument: the assumption that the constraint on productivity is time at your desk. Let's leave aside the issue of whether you are productive walking to the printer. The more serious issue is that you aren't equally productive the whole time you sit at your desk. What if you spend your extra two minutes (in reduced time picking up printouts) at I Can Has Cheezburger?

Well, the efficiency expert may counter, all I need to assume is that a fixed percentage of your desk time is productive. But that's still a big assumption. Maybe the real constraint on your daily productivity is mental energy, and you only have enough mental energy to do four hours of real work a day. Then your extra two minutes will all go to looking at pictures of cats with ungrammatical captions. Even more likely, maybe the real constraint is your internal sense of what a reasonable day's work is. Many of us have either left early because we got a lot done or stayed late because we got little done. Maybe the real constraint is how much work your supervisor expects you to do. Maybe the real constraint is how much your colleagues get done, either for process reasons or simply because workplace norms are set by group as a whole. Maybe the real constraint is your motivation level. Maybe the real constraint is customer demand.... All of these possibilities seem much more likely to me than the idea that the limiting constraint is time spent at your desk. And if any of them is true, then moving the printer has gained you nothing.

So is Kwak on to something? He's certainly not the first person to point out that our ideas of efficiency and productivity are often based on assumptions that made more sense in an older, assembly line heavy economy than in one where many more of us rely on brains rather than brawn to earn our paychecks. But the more one believes that time in matters far less than results out, the more one moves towards supporting a results only work environment.

How far along this continuum, which stretches from a strict nine to five with careful attention paid to efficiency and hours to an office where all that counts are the measurable end products of your effort, are you prepared to go? And how much does it depend on the type of work an individual is engaged in or how genuinely busy their lives are?

Read More on BNET:

• Everything You Know About Productivity Is Wrong
• The Daredevil's Guide to Personal Productivity
• Want to Be More Productive? Kill Your Career Goals