The other day, someone who will one day be a client asked me if my diagnostic process could make her more efficient.   I sat with that for a while. Then I wrote back:   

Efficiency is a word that should be banned for all time

Particularly when it comes to humans. Here’s where it came from. Henry Ford. Around 1913. Conveyor belts, time-motion studies, the relentless squeezing of every ounce of variation out of a human being in service of throughput. It was a manufacturing concept. Brilliant for cars, catastrophic for people. We absorbed it so completely we forgot it was ever just a choice someone made about how to run a factory.   And absolutely nothing in the way we live, work, or play has changed since then, has it?  

My neurodivergent clients

Would never be called efficient by any useful measure. Deep thinking, massive squirrelling, intense focus on the seemingly trivial, handling a hundred ideas simultaneously, and still being unable to put dinner on the table at regular intervals. That is not linear efficiency. And yet, help them build a process that works for them, and magically, they get everything done. On time, on budget. Much to their own amazement.  

On any given day, my own desk is a disaster.

I have twenty juggling balls in the air at once. And at least the same amount of piles of paper strewn beside my laptop. By the standard definition, I am a mess. But look at what gets accomplished inside a week, based on the way I actually process my thoughts and tasks, and it’s an effing powerhouse.  

So here’s what I think the real problem is.

Not efficiency. It’s something simpler and more honest.  Are the majority of your hours spent on things that energize you, or things that drain you?   Those are not the same question. But we’ve been trained to treat them as if they are.  

The deeper lie is this:

We have come to believe that time is something we own. Something we can save, spend, or manage. A resource we control. In truth, time is more like weather. It moves through and around us, indifferent to our calendars. What we actually control is attention. Where we aim our awareness as the minutes slip by.  

This reframe matters because “I didn’t have time” is almost always a polite cover for something else. Something more uncomfortable. I traded what mattered for what was immediately in front of me, because that was easier than pausing to question what I was doing.   Busyness has become an anesthetic. We schedule ourselves out of noticing that we’re not living the lives we secretly hoped might be possible.  

And the machine loves it that way.

In a culture where profit depends on capturing our attention, our distraction is somebody’s revenue stream. What looks like free entertainment is frequently an industrial system for converting our awareness into data, our restlessness into consumption, and our unease into dependency.  

Using time well under those conditions starts with a small act of rebellion. Reclaiming the right to direct our own attention instead of renting it out to whoever is loudest. Not optimizing. Not hacking. Not squeezing.

Just noticing where we actually are.

Next week: if efficiency is the wrong metric, what’s the right one?