The efficiency trap

When I became a mother, I closed my office door. Not dramatically—no manifesto, no announcement. I just needed to get more work done in less time, and open doors invite conversations that consume minutes I no longer had. Before my daughter was born, I was a tenure-track business school professor who kept that door ajar as a matter of professional faith. Hallway talk is where ideas happen, where goodwill accumulates, where careers get built. After she arrived, with daycare pickup hardwired into my schedule, I became a practitioner of what I would later hear a research participant describe as “ruthless efficiency.” I had no time to waste. No time to be nice, craft perfect emails, or linger in conversations. I had work to produce and a finite window in which to produce it. What I didn’t consider, at the time, was what I was sacrificing. Efficiency tends to be revered in modern working life. Minimize waste, maximize output. Do more with less, faster, with fewer resources. In my field of management and organizational behavior, efficiency is nearly universally coded as virtuous. It correlates with conscientiousness. It underlies organizational economics. Work-family researchers even identify it as a way that working parents can enrich their jobs: the focus, the concentration, and avoiding the squandering of a single precious minute. But lately, I wonder whether we are confusing efficiency with ruthlessness—a kind of desperate short-termism that feels productive in the moment but can cost us over time. The Closed Door After my kids were born, I turned my research to what academics politely call “me-search,” studying working mothers who had recently returned from maternity leave. Sifting through open-ended survey responses, I kept encountering the same pattern: women describing having to become “ruthlessly efficient” just to hold their professional lives together. They couldn’t stay late for happy hours or linger over lunch. Every interaction was triaged for necessity. One participant wrote: “I don’t socialize, like, at all.” Another: “I was more direct, spending less time trying to be nice . . . I didn’t have time for ‘making nice’ anymore.” My co-authors and I had mixed reactions. The efficiency these women were developing was genuinely valuable as a transferable skill that organizations could benefit from, and one that was helping them stay in their jobs during a period known for its precarious effect on mothers’ career continuation. Another co-author and I wrote in HBR about it as an argument for why employers should better support working mothers: skills honed at home, under conditions of radical scarcity, can become competitive advantages at work. But we also documented the tradeoffs, and they were not small. Work relationships thinned. Informal networks, the kind that don’t appear on organizational charts but can determine who gets promoted, frayed. One participant captured it plainly: “Time-wise I have had to become more efficient, but that has meant focusing on the tangible aspects of the job . . . I do what I need to do to keep my job. I don’t have time to do the things that might progress my career.” The closed door was efficient, but also isolating. Women can produce more output, yet are simultaneously sacrificing future opportunities those hallway conversations might have produced. Benefits were visible and immediate, but costs were invisible and deferred. This asymmetry is the central mechanism of what I refer to as the efficiency trap. From Ruthless to Sustainable We are living through a moment of unprecedented time pressure: always on, perpetually connected, chronically overworked. When you are drowning, you grab what’s floating. You don’t stop to ask what you might be releasing as you reach. This urgency is real, and I am not dismissing it. But it is precisely when the pressure is greatest that we are most likely to mistake ruthlessness for resourcefulness. I want to propose a distinction that I think does matter: between sustainable efficiency and ruthless efficiency. Sustainable efficiency is what happens when you streamline a genuinely unnecessary process, cut busywork, or automate the tedious so that human attention can go where it is irreplaceable. It creates lasting value. Ruthless efficiency is what happens when you cut corners on relationships, skip the deliberation that protects against error, or sacrifice quality for speed. With ruthless efficiency, short-term gain wins without considering long-term loss. With sustainable efficiency, both are at least weighed. There is also the question of slack. Since Frederick Winslow Taylor, organizations have pursued efficiency partly by eliminating idle time—the gaps, the wandering, the moments that don’t appear to produce anything. But for creative work, and for knowledge work, slack is not waste. It is the medium in which insight forms. The hallway conversations I stopped having when I closed my office door made me more efficient with my immediate tasks. They also cost me relationships, contextual knowledge, and social awareness of what was happening in my organization. These are things that don’t show up on a daily productivity ledger but matter enormously over a career. The efficiency trap is not that efficiency is bad. The question is not whether to be efficient. It is what we are willing to sacrifice for it, and whether we are making that choice with our eyes open. I still close my office door sometimes. The time-crunching pressures that first drove me to do it certainly haven’t disappeared. But I now try to ask myself the question I didn’t ask then: What am I actually trading for this? Not as an abstract philosophical exercise, but as a genuine reckoning with what the hallway conversation might have produced, what relationship I am not building, what capability I am not developing. It’s not whether we pursue efficiency. It’s whether we are at least honest with ourselves about the price we’re paying.