The Problem With Efficiency: How "wasted time" builds human capital

Co-authored by Professor of Marketing Ed Love

It’s June, which means the faculty's summer is upon us. This is our time to do the projects that we’ve postponed all year — things that have been piling up in our notebooks and the backs of our brains. Research papers will be submitted, plants will be planted, and things will be organized. This is when we really get to think, and for many of us, our thoughts turn to optimization of these precious weeks. How do we get the most out of summer? How do get the most fun, the most productivity, the most of everything out of it?

But this is probably a terrible way to think about this time. In fact, as the focus everywhere seems to be on optimization, we are going to try doing the opposite, especially in terms of how we work this summer.

We hear all the chatter about trying to be as efficient as possible, removing process friction, and checking all the boxes so that you can move to the next thing as fast as possible. We have a big problem with the all-important productivity metric. Actually, two problems.