Fuck Taylor — The Whole Idea of Efficiency is Broken

“Fuck Taylor.”

Few things both­er me as much as “work faster” gurus. 

I find the concept of “being effi­cient” and “being effect­ive” fun­da­ment­ally broken.

Allow me to explain:

Why Inbox Zero is Not My Cup of Coffee

Now, I want to talk to you about cof­fee in a minute, but first, let’s talk about emails. Whenever the top­ic of email man­age­ment comes up, the assump­tion is always that all of us have this bot­tom­less hatred of emails — and we must all loathe our inboxes.

There’s just this prob­lem: I don’t hate answer­ing emails.
I think it’s nice when someone sends me a good email.
And, I don’t mind writ­ing a good email myself, either. 

Also, I love it when a blog read­er drops me a line to say hello and con­nect. If this would hap­pen to me a hun­dred times a day, then I’d con­sider myself lucky for hav­ing the prob­lem of find­ing the time to respond. 

Like every­one, I, too, get spam and oth­er emails that aren’t very good, but I don’t mind tweak­ing my fil­ters now and then. I enjoy tweak­ing my inbox rules!

But for some reas­on, unbe­knownst to me, the con­sensus seems to be that I should hate spend­ing time in my inbox and do away with any incom­ing emails as quickly as humanly pos­sible. As if Inbox Zero was some­how cool.

I don’t get this. 

I enjoy reply­ing to good emails, so I craft my responses with care and atten­tion to detail. 

I think it mat­ters greatly to find the right choice of words and string them togeth­er in a ton­al­ity that serves my intentions. 

But, seem­ingly, none of this is as essen­tial as speed-writ­ing stac­cato emails accen­tu­ated by the oblig­at­ory emoji to make up for any mis­takes in tonality.

Yuck.

“Fast” vs. “Awesome”

I’ve got­ten caught up in the glor­i­fic­a­tion of doing things as fast as humanly pos­sible myself: 

I once took a severe stab at both speed-read­ing and touch-typing. 

Speed-read­ing was easy; the secret was to stop mak­ing the words with your tongue muscles as you dash through the text. 

Touch-typ­ing was worse; it was all about prac­tising not look­ing at the key­board. As it turned out in the end, both tech­niques were per­fect ways to des­troy the artist­ic enjoy­ment of both read­ing and writing.

I’ve stopped mak­ing excuses for being who I am. I’m a tact­ile per­son, and I want to feel what I do. At my com­puter, I use a clunky mech­an­ic­al gam­ing key­board. Why? 

Because I want to feel each stroke of each let­ter and num­ber, and the text about to be writ­ten decides how much time it wants, not me or any­one else.

Coffee and Meetings

The same kind of reas­on­ing goes for my morn­ing coffee. 

I enjoy each great cup of cof­fee as if it was my last. I could, of course, down four cups of cof­fee in ten minutes, but why would I want to do that? 

And if I did down those pre­cious drops like there was no tomor­row, I indeed would­n’t con­sider it to be an accom­plish­ment. To me, this goes for doing everything that I love doing. 

If I would feel the urge to get any­thing enjoy­able over quickly to get my fix — then it’s an addic­tion that ought to be kept in check.

What about meet­ings, then? 

Everyone seems to be over the moon about hav­ing short and fast-paced meet­ings. But I’ve always had long meet­ings with my cli­ents and col­leagues — some­times meet­ings that have las­ted for hours on end. We would talk, relate to each oth­er, exper­i­ment with ideas and con­cepts, explore vari­ous inter­est­ing ven­ues of reas­on­ing, and we would laugh, argue, and listen. 

With this approach to meet­ings, we’ve been able to get to places and res­ults that we oth­er­wise would nev­er have obtained.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate bad meet­ings, just as I hate lousy emails and lousy cof­fee. And I can accept that a bad meet­ing is less use­less if it’s being kept short. But the fun­da­ment­al prob­lem here is not the length of the meet­ing — it’s the qual­ity of the cof­fee… sorry, the qual­ity of the meet­ing.

But I can­’t see the value of con­di­tion­ing one­self to have more bad short meet­ings, reply quick­er to more bad emails, or drink more bad cups of cof­fee faster. 

If all of this is part of what con­sti­tutes effi­ciency, then all those gurus can keep all their “effi­cien­cies” to them­selves — at least as far as I’m concerned.

The Fear of Being Slow

Now, I think I know what many pro­fes­sion­als fear in this regard: 

They fear being accused of being lazy or, worse — being slow.
But that’s not how exper­i­ence and pas­sion works. 

Example: If it takes a juni­or PR con­sult­ant 30 minutes to draft a press release, I could prob­ably pro­duce a press release with the same qual­ity in ten minutes.

If I get 30 minutes to write that press release, the aver­age juni­or can­’t match my draft — even if giv­en a whole week to try.

And, it would take a good two hours to write that press release. I might even be able to write some­thing worth reading.

Does this make me slow? Does this make me lazy? 

Well, if that were to be accur­ate, would that be so bad, then? For the human side of doing busi­ness, I rate exper­i­ence, pas­sion, and cre­ativ­ity a lot high­er than out­put per minute. We should promptly out­source any such repet­it­ive tasks to machines and com­puters anyway. 

Now, some PR pro­fes­sion­als might react to the example of the press release as I’m imply­ing that juni­or PR con­sult­ants rarely pro­duces press releases worth read­ing. Still, writ­ing press releases is what many juni­or PR con­sult­ants do. To those of you who think that I’m out of line here, I’d ask you to ran­domly col­lect a whole bunch of offi­cially pub­lished press releases and read them through. As per your estim­a­tion, how many of them are close to what they could’ve been in terms of quality?

Frederick Winslow Taylor is fam­ously known as an early cru­sader against inef­fi­ciency. After a few failed exper­i­ments on the fact­ory floor, he got fired — but was­n’t dis­cour­aged. Instead, he became what could be seen as the world’s first man­age­ment con­sult­ant.

Taylor’s basic premise was that all fact­ory work­ers were lazy, but We could fix that with a stop­watch. Well, you get the idea.

As far as I’m con­cerned: Fuck Taylor. And as for all of you effi­ciency gurus out there, it’s noth­ing per­son­al, but fuck you too. 

We must bring your reign to an end. 

Your cul­tur­al super­star­dom must have its ped­es­tals sawn clean off. Go and solve Sudoku for time or some­thing. ¹This, how­ever, is truly not fair. Creating and solv­ing sudoku puzzles at the highest level requires ingeni­ous crafts­man­ship, pas­sion, and exper­i­ence. If you don’t believe me, check out the … Continue read­ing

Slowness: Experience, Passion, and Creativity

We need a soci­ety where young people are encour­aged to add that little extra oomph to every deliv­ery — even if they might fail to add actu­al value every time. 

We need a soci­ety where we appre­ci­ate that exper­i­ence war­rants extra time for a level of qual­ity, ingenu­ity, and innov­a­tion that oth­er­wise could nev­er be obtained.

Instead, we should be cel­eb­rat­ing exper­i­ence, pas­sion, and cre­ativ­ity.

Now, I’m turn­ing my phone off to enjoy a slow cup of cof­fee in my own time because any­thing I pro­duce after­wards will be a whole lot bet­ter because of that slowness.