Too much to do: why getting more efficient won't save you

Monday, 8:30 a.m. You open your inbox: 47 unread messages. By one o'clock you've hit zero, and for a moment you feel unstoppable. By three, another 31 have landed, and half of them are replies to your replies. Meanwhile the proposal for the new client is still stuck on page one, and the freelance project you've been meaning to launch for a year is still a folder on your desktop. You've tried Inbox Zero, Notion, time blocking. You've never been more efficient, and you still have too much to do. It isn't your fault. It's a trap.

The efficiency trap

Oliver Burkeman, a British journalist, fell into it for years. He tells the story in Four Thousand Weeks, a book about time management that starts from a brutal calculation: if you live to eighty, you get roughly four thousand weeks.

Drowning in email, Burkeman adopted Inbox Zero, the method for emptying your inbox every day. It worked. And he discovered that when you get incredibly fast at answering email, all that happens is you get a lot more email.

The mechanism is simple. Every reply triggers another reply, and once you're known as the person who always answers right away, more people decide it's worth writing to you. Work goes the same way: deliver everything in record time and the extra work lands on your desk. Your boss isn't stupid. Why would she give it to someone slower?

Burkeman calls it the efficiency trap: the better you get at clearing things, the more things arrive to be cleared. In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century nobody would need to work more than about fifteen hours a week. That century is almost up. You know how it turned out.

The hidden cost: doing the wrong things brilliantly

The trap isn't only about volume. When you believe you can fit everything in, you stop asking whether each new request is really worth your time. You say yes to everything, because you assume you won't have to give anything up. And your days fill up with less and less important things, often the ones that make life easier for other people.

Burkeman admits he was a master of this. He'd jump on the email from the IT department asking him to change his password. Meanwhile, a long message from an old friend who'd moved to New Delhi went unanswered, and the major article he'd been planning for months never got started. He was waiting for a decent block of free time, once he'd cleared the small stuff off his desk. But every night, the desk filled up again.

Sound familiar? You clear your inbox, knock out the quick tasks, reply on Slack, all to "free up your head" so you can finally get to what matters. That moment never comes. You can lose years this way, systematically postponing the very things you care about most.

Too much to do: three rules for choosing what matters

If there will never be enough time for everything, the real question isn't how to do more. It's what to leave undone. Burkeman offers three principles.

1. Pay yourself first. The idea comes from personal finance: put your savings aside the day your paycheck arrives and you won't miss the money; wait until the end of the month and there's nothing left. Time works the same way. The illustrator Jessica Abel stopped trying to squeeze her drawing in between everything else and started drawing every day, for an hour or two, before anything else. If something matters to you, do a piece of it today, however small.
2. Limit your work in progress. Starting ten projects at once gives you the illusion of moving forward on every front. In reality, every time one gets hard you bounce to another, and none of them gets finished. Set a hard cap instead: three things at a time, at most. A new one only comes in when you've finished one.
3. Resist middling priorities. There's a story that Warren Buffett once told his pilot to list the twenty-five most important goals in his life, keep the top five, and avoid the other twenty at all costs. Burkeman himself admits the story is probably apocryphal, but the point stands: what derails you isn't the useless stuff, it's the things just interesting enough to distract you. As Elizabeth Gilbert puts it, you have to learn to say no to things you actually want to do.

If you need a concrete way to protect that first slice of time, Neil Fiore's Unschedule starts right there.

Decide in advance what you'll be bad at

There's one last idea that takes an enormous weight off. Since your time and energy are limited, you're going to fall short at something anyway. You might as well choose what.

For the next two months, say, your apartment won't be spotless and you'll make it to the gym once a week, because you're launching a project. Then you'll switch: ease off at work to spend more time with your family. Burkeman calls it strategic underachievement. When you're the one deciding where to let things slide, the mediocre result stops making you feel guilty.

And in the evening, instead of staring at the list of what's left, try keeping a list of what you got done. It starts empty every morning and fills up as the day goes on. You'll find you finished far more than you thought.

Build your closed list today

All you need is five minutes.

1. Write down everything you have pending on an open list. It'll be very long, and that's fine: you don't have to clear it.
2. Pick three things at most and move them to a closed list. Until you finish one, nothing new goes on it.
3. Tomorrow morning, before you open your inbox, give half an hour to the first of the three.

Your email will wait for you, the way it always has. The thing that matters has been waiting for months.