Hi,
Somewhere along the line, we got tricked into believing that efficiency equals success.
We started to believe that the person with the fullest calendar, highest productivity metrics, and shortest email response time is the one who’s winning.
We began treating our lives like machines with every second accounted for, every task tracked, and every outcome optimized.
This was supposed to make life easier and better…
…and yet, we’re exhausted, unhappy, and worst of all, we’re still broke despite running faster and faster on the hamster wheel for years. “Gurus” have been telling us all along that time=money, but what if the real flex isn’t doing more, faster, better?
What if the most radical thing you can do today is take a nap at 2 pm, go see a movie in the middle of the week, or sit quietly with a cup of tea doing absolutely nothing productive?
In a world addicted to hyper-efficiency, choosing deliberate inefficiency is a power move.
This is something aristocrats have known for centuries. There’s nothing more gauche than working…unless it’s for them.
They will dangle the carrot in front of you as long as it keeps you working for their bottom line, but no matter how much you work for them, they always want more. The cult of efficiency is built on the foundational lie that doing more makes you worth more.
We’ve all internalized this belief to some degree. We feel guilty for resting. We apologize for delayed replies. We hustle through burnout and call it “grind culture.”
But who does this actually benefit?
Not you, and probably not anyone you would care about even a little if they didn’t offer you a paycheck.
The system demands more output, but not necessarily better input. It feeds on your constant motion. When you slow down, it starves the machine, taking back your time, and reclaiming your sovereignty.
That’s the real power, but more importantly, it’s just more fun to inefficient. We simply like our lives more when there is space to play around. No matter what productivity makes us think, we humans usually think it’s pretty great to get lost in a useless moment.
Honestly, I can’t believe I have to write this, since it should be so obvious that “wasted” time is where the good stuff lives, but I’ll bet every memory you treasure and photo you’ll never delete was probably created inefficiently.
While I’ll grant the idea that in some jobs working faster actually makes you more productive, that’s not true for knowledge workers that thrive on great ideas. When one great idea is worth a million, or even a billion dollars, churning out more and more average ideas is ludicrous.
You don’t get breakthrough ideas while grinding through back-to-back meetings. You get them in the shower, on a walk, or while doodling in the margins of a notebook.
When we create margin in our lives, we invite innovation. We create space for insight.
And even when you’re not in pursuit of some big epiphany, giving yourself permission to waste time is restorative. Watching a movie in the middle of a Tuesday isn’t indulgent. It’s why life is worth living.
You might think that inefficiency a privilege, but our ancestors literally died to make it a human right. They died for a weekend, a 40 hour workweek, and to not be worked like a robot.
And here we are letting it happen again!
We’ve been conditioned to maximize every moment, while those with power and money build in leisure as a default.
Efficiency is a trap. It’s a race designed to keep you constantly performing, constantly optimizing, and constantly comparing your worth to someone else’s output. It’s a game you can never win, because the finish line keeps moving.
If you’re a creative type human, inefficiency isn’t optional. It’s your lifeblood.
Yes, a big part of your job is to show up consistently, but showing up doesn’t mean burning out. It means letting boredom creep in sometimes. Letting your subconscious do its thing. Letting the gaps between tasks breathe a little.
Truly original work is born from the liminal spaces, unoptimized hours, and inefficient parts of your life that don’t make it into the Instagram highlight reel.
And ironically? Those inefficient moments are often the ones your audience connects to the most.
I have meetings every week where super successful people confess they still feel the need to grind it out, not because their bank account is low, but because they have been trained since birth that any time they have must be filled with work to fuel the machine.
If even they are brainwashed, what chance to we have of breaking free? None, unless we do it with intention.
Money means nothing if we don’t use it wisely. Yes, we need some baseline to live, and some amount saved to feel safe, but after that the only thing worth buying back in this business is your time.
That said, what’s the point of even doing that if we can’t feel good about using it to putz around? Pursuing money in service to pursuing more money is an miserable game that never leads to happiness.
If this idea feels radical to you, good.
It shouldn’t, though, and that’s the problem with the whole system.
This should be the obvious base state of every single human on this planet. I shouldn’t have to convince you that you get the best ideas in your downtime because I should never have to justify taking downtime.
That I do have to justify inefficiency proves something is fundamentally wrong with the whole system.
Don’t worry, though, you’re not alone. Everyone feels this way, even me a lot of the time. So, to help break this cycle, here’s how to start flexing your inefficiency muscle:
Schedule blank space - Yes, actually put it on your calendar. A morning off. An evening without screens. A whole Saturday with no agenda. Let the blank space be sacred.
Say no without apology - Not every opportunity is worth your time. Not every hour needs to be monetized. Your calendar doesn’t need to be full to justify your existence.
Do one “useless” thing a day - Watch a movie. Go to the beach. Bake bread. Sketch. Dance badly. Something purely for the joy of it, with zero ROI.
Plan elasticity - Leave space in your workflow. Don’t book every minute. Build in valleys between the peaks. Let your schedule breathe.
Protect your peak creative time - Whether you’re a morning tinkerer or a midnight dreamer, protect that sacred time. Don’t dilute it with meetings or admin. Let it be inefficient and exploratory.
It makes me so sad that I have to make a list to tell you how to relax and not feel burdened about it, and yet here we are.
You don’t have to prove your worth through busyness. You don’t have to chase every shiny productivity hack. You don’t have to collapse under the weight of a to-do list written by expectations.
You are allowed to rest, wander, and be gloriously inefficient.
Because inefficiency isn’t failure, it’s freedom. It’s the space to create, connect, and breathe.
And that? That’s the real flex.
I love this post for giving me permission to be ‘lazy’ and unproductive, instead of guilty for not getting more done. Thank you.