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