I’m making the case for going against the grain. We need less optimization and more joy.
We’ve become obsessed with efficiency. And it’s making us less happy faster. We optimize our calendars, streamline our workflows, measure our productivity, and squeeze every last drop of value out of our time. Businesses chase quarterly earnings. Employees are expected to do more with less. Even our hobbies have become opportunities to track progress, set goals, and improve performance.
Somewhere along the way, we turned living into a productivity project. No judgement, I’m one of you. I track my sleep, my workouts, and even if I’m spending enough play time with each of my kids. True story.
But what if the things that make life meaningful: creativity, innovation, connection, and joy, are precisely the things that get squeezed out when we try to make everything more efficient?
What if going against the grain isn’t a waste of time, but one of the most valuable things we can do?
“Efficiency Has a Place. It Just Isn’t Everywhere.”
Let’s be clear: efficiency isn’t inherently bad. We want emergency rooms to operate effectively, bridges to be built safely, and mundane administrative tasks to take less time.
The problem begins when efficiency becomes the goal instead of a tool, and when profitability becomes the primary measure of success. Anyone navigating health insurance in the U.S. these days knows exactly what I’m talking about.
We are seeing companies with record profits, lay off thousands of people. CEO’s making millions in bonuses while they gut their own employee base for better quarterly earnings or temporary stock price. In that kind of environment, what employee is going to take a bet on the next innovation?
Creativity requires experimentation. Innovation requires the freedom to fail. There is no freedom when you are constantly worrying about your job. Discovery often happens when we wander, which is hard to do when you’re rushing from meeting to meeting. And joy? Joy rarely arrives because we optimized our schedule to accommodate it.
Think about some of the best moments in your life. Maybe you took a wrong turn and discovered a beautiful hiking trail. Maybe a conversation with a stranger changed your perspective. Maybe a moment of boredom turned into a project that you still cherish.
None of those moments needed a performance metric. They needed space.
When we eliminate every inefficiency, we risk eliminating the very conditions that allow something unexpected and wonderful to happen.
When Corporate Hierarchy Loses the Plot
Nowhere is our obsession with efficiency more obvious than in corporate America.
Organizations build elaborate hierarchies to create accountability, clarify decision-making, and ensure work gets done. Those things have value. But somewhere between the org chart and the quarterly business review, many companies lose sight of the actual goal.
Instead of empowering the people closest to a problem to solve it, they create layers of approval. Instead of rewarding thoughtful dissent, they reward agreement with leadership. Instead of asking whether a policy makes sense, they ask whether the policy was followed.
As both an operations and HR leader for many years, I can’t even tell you how many policies I’ve seen that tried to solve one problem and then made everything else worse.
We end up with employees spending hours preparing presentations to convince someone two levels above them to approve an idea that the people doing the work already know will succeed. Or in a case I was recently consulting, a team create a quarterly business review showing how busy they were, but never asking if the work actually added value or solved any problems.
We promote people into management because they’re good at their jobs, then bury them in meetings until they have no time to do those jobs. Don’t even get me started on how we make them managers based on skills that have nothing to do with managing humans, and then don’t teach them how to be a leader either. We demand innovation while penalizing failure. We tell employees to think outside the box, provided they don’t challenge the person who designed the box.
And then we wonder why people are disengaged.
“You cannot demand innovation while building a culture that punishes people for questioning the status quo.”
Hierarchy becomes particularly counterproductive when proximity to power matters more than proximity to the problem. The person with the most relevant information may have the least authority, while the person with the most authority may be the furthest removed from reality.
The result? Slower decisions, wasted talent, and organizations that become exceptionally good at protecting their processes while forgetting their purpose. Even worse, leaders who have lost complete touch with how customers experience their service.
This isn’t an argument for eliminating leadership or accountability. It’s an argument for remembering what leadership is supposed to accomplish: creating the conditions for people to do their best work. Also continuously checking what the front line experience actually is, not just what they think it is.
Sometimes the most innovative thing a company can do is listen to the person who has been saying for three years that the process doesn’t work.
Five Examples of when the Drive for Profit Can Hurt the Greater Good
Capitalism can encourage competition, investment, and useful innovation. But when maximizing profit takes precedence over human well-being and the public good, the consequences are significant and shouldn’t be forgotten.
- Healthcare puts profit over people
When insurance companies reward denials instead of treatment, they are playing with actual human lives. When people delay care because they cannot afford it, the system says we prioritize revenue over humans. A society that treats healthcare primarily as a revenue opportunity, making access to essential care dependent on someone’s ability to pay rather than their need is a society in breakdown.
- Our food system prioritizes cheap over healthy or nutritious.
Industrial food production can make food abundant and affordable. But incentives favoring shelf life, convenience, and low production costs also encourage highly processed products while making nutritious food less accessible to many communities. When the true costs of diet-related illness and environmental damage aren’t reflected in the price, we all pay the bill.
- Planned obsolescence turns consumption into a treadmill.
Products that are difficult to repair, software that stops supporting older devices, and goods designed around short replacement cycles encourage people to buy more than they need. Companies may benefit from repeat purchases, but communities pay through waste, resource extraction, and pollution. Durability and repairability may be better for the public even when they generate fewer replacement sales. Plus it keeps people working longer to make money to spend on things they wouldn’t otherwise need.
- Social media monetizes our attention, not our well-being.
Most digital platforms make money by keeping us engaged. That creates incentives to maximize screen time, clicks, and advertising revenue, even when the content that holds our attention fuels outrage, anxiety, or division. Our attention becomes the product, while our ability to focus, connect, and enjoy the present moment becomes collateral damage.
- Environmental destruction gets treated as an acceptable business expense.
When companies can profit from extracting resources while shifting pollution, habitat loss, and climate-related costs onto the public, the financial picture can look better than the real one. The short-term gains may accrue to shareholders, while communities, wildlife, and future generations inherit the consequences. A classic example is that whether you know it or not, you likely have DuPont’s poisonous C8 somewhere in your body. The company had evidence as early as the 1950’s that their Teflon products were harmful, and yet the company allegedly hid those findings for more than 40 years until the EPA fined them millions of dollars. Those fines don’t undo the harm.
These examples aren’t arguments against every business or every pursuit of profit. They’re reminders that “what is profitable isn’t always what is valuable, and what is measurable isn’t always what matters.”
A healthy society needs businesses that succeed. It also needs guardrails, accountability, and a broader definition of success. If profit comes at the cost of the people it is supposed to help, then it’s not only short sighted, but I’d argue psychotic.
We need to ask more than, “Can we do this faster and cheaper?” We need to ask, “Should we? Who benefits? Who pays the price? And what are we losing in the process?”
Three Things You Can Do Today to Fight Efficiency for Creativity and Joy
You don’t need to overhaul your life or quit your job to start resisting the tyranny of optimization. Begin with small acts of intentional inefficiency.
- Do something without trying to get better at it.
Draw a terrible picture. Dance in your kitchen. Bake something without worrying about making it Instagram-worthy. Take a walk without tracking your steps or listening to a podcast.
Give yourself permission to be a beginner, to be imperfect, and to enjoy an experience without turning it into an achievement.
The point isn’t to produce something. It’s to experience something.
- Take the scenic route.
Literally or figuratively, choose one thing today that you would normally do the fastest way possible, and do it differently.
Walk a new route. Visit a local shop instead of ordering online. Strike up a conversation. Spend an extra ten minutes exploring something that catches your attention.
Curiosity needs room to breathe. You can’t discover much if you never leave the path you already know.
- Protect one pocket of unoptimized time.
Block out 20 minutes this week with no agenda, no productivity goal, and no expectation that you accomplish anything.
Sit outside. Play with your dog. Call someone you miss. Watch the clouds. Let your mind wander.
If you’re uncomfortable doing nothing, notice that feeling without immediately trying to fix it. We’ve been conditioned to believe that time must be justified by output. It doesn’t.
Sometimes the best use of time is simply being alive for it.
The World Needs More Than Efficiency
There will always be pressure to move faster, produce more, and make everything measurable. But we don’t have to accept that pressure as the ultimate authority on how we spend our lives.
The most meaningful breakthroughs often begin with someone questioning the accepted way of doing things. The most memorable days often include moments we never planned. And some of our greatest contributions to the world may come from following an idea that doesn’t make immediate financial sense.
Going against the grain isn’t about rejecting progress. It’s about questioning a version of progress that leaves people exhausted, communities struggling, and the natural world depleted.
It’s about remembering that we are human beings, not production units.
So today, do something inefficient. Follow your curiosity. Make room for a little absurdity. Find a reason to laugh.
Because a life spent optimizing every minute might look impressive on paper.
But a life filled with creativity, connection, and joy? That’s a return on investment worth having.
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Yvonne Lee-Hawkins is a Holistic Career & Burnout Coach supporting high-performing professionals through career transitions, leadership challenges, and burnout recovery.
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