A Short Piece
Efficiency Without Intrinsic Motivation Is Inefficient
The Ironies of Perfecting Efficiency Quantitatively at the Expensive of Qualitative Drive and Heidegger’s Standing Reserve
For Thomas Jockin’s upcoming course, “On Health and Virtue: A Journey to Well-Being with Plato and Aristotle”, visit here:
Thomas Jockin and I spoke on why it’s important to include buffers in our schedule, because often things come up we don’t expect. If we’re moving and plan to start a new job on Monday, it might seem efficient and rational to have the movers show up at our new home on Friday — that’ll give us two days to unpack and prepare before Monday rolls around. It would be illogical to show up on Thursday, wouldn’t it? That would waste time. Yes, people who schedule well would aim for Friday…
The movers call.
The truck broke down.
They’ll arrive on Tuesday.
Shoot, the boss needs you.
On Sunday.
Emergency.
Movers again: electricity went out.
They can’t use their computers to locate where the stuff is —
Indefinite delay.
Sound familiar?
We’ve all had situations where something is planned, and a surprise throws the schedule off: it happens so often that expecting otherwise can seem silly. Well, if that’s the case, what are we talking about when we say it’s rational and “a good idea” to schedule the movers to come on Friday? Are we fooling ourselves?
Life is full of surprises, and if that’s true, there’s an argument to be made that we’re not being rational or efficient to not include “space for surprises” in our plans. But what’s the efficient and rational way to go about doing that? Jockin and I agreed it’s important to have “buffers” in a schedule to make sure that if something happens and movers are late (for example), we have made enough space in our schedule to be able to adjust things accordingly. But how long should that buffer be? Well, there’s no way to systemize that: it seems to be a judgment call. But how do we make one of those? That comes down to the person making the judgment, but the fact this should be considered at all means we are moving away from entirely quantifiable calculations to something else. A qualitative and particular judgment is needed. It could be wrong, but to just outsource our schedules and plans to “what’s efficient” doesn’t seem right either. In fact, the later is bound to be upset by surprises, sooner or later.
Life lesson: add buffers to your plans, some space and time where decisions and adjustments can be made if something goes wrong. Hyper-rationality can get in the way of this though, so we must be careful that we don’t emphasize efficiency so much that we prove inefficient. But what is efficiency then? Not something easy to quantify, it seems…
But there’s a larger point to be considered, because the question arises: why don’t people tend to have “buffers” in their schedule? Why is that so rare? Please note a world where everyone is trying to “efficiently” get the most out of every moment is likely to be very stressed, because one surprise or mistake and all the things scheduled right up against one another are going to be thrown off and everything will have to be rescheduled and people will be mad and — yea, some buffers would have been a good idea. Ah, but if we add buffers, it might look like we are wasting time or not being efficient, so social pressures could be a reason for this great “inefficient efficiency.” No one wants to be seen as wasting time, and so we arrange our days to be as busy as possible, and that means we won’t have any buffers. And then — surprise.
We discuss often the need for “nonrationality” to avoid Nash Equilibria and suboptimal results, and this would be example of that point: if we don’t do something “nonrational” and schedule some intentional time in which there is nothing going on, we will likely end up by our “rationality” in bad situations. Nonrationality is hard to do though because of social pressures, and what is “nonrational” and useful from a Game Theoretic standpoint, seems “irrational” to those outside the schema. Does that explain why people don’t make “buffers” in their schedules? That’s part of it, but I think there’s more.
People might not schedule “buffer time” in their days or weeks — which can also mean they avoid rest — because they hate having nothing to do. We despise boredom. If we arrive at our new home a month before our job starts, sure, we’ll be ready for surprises (which might not even happen), but what will we do? We could be bored. (And what might come up “in us” if we have nothing to do?) Where people are “extrinsically motivated” primarily, time where nothing is planned is time that can feel not only wasted but existentially difficult to accept and handle. And this means there’s another “good reason” to avoid buffers in the schedule: we could suffer anxiety and worse. And that’s no fun.
As Jockin and I discussed, it seems to me that without drive and/or “intrinsic motivation,” we probably won’t schedule buffers into our weeks, precisely because drive generally means we always have something to do. If we arrive at work an hour early, no problem, we’ll work on our work. If we show up at our new home two weeks before our new job starts, that’s great: we can finally read those books we wanted to read. And so on: drive gives us a motivation that can fill in “buffer spaces” with something to do. In fact, we may want “buffer spaces” to do our work: it’s not a hard choice at all. And paradoxically, this could mean that the drive we’ve cultivated — which perhaps was once called “impractical” and “not a good use of time” — could turn around and prove invaluable for helping us make the most of our time and avoiding “suboptimal results” in our plans and schedules. Drive helps us not worry about wasting time, because we never have to waste time (there’s more freedom, in a way). We always have something to do. “Buffer” away.
Without drive, I don’t know if it’s possible for people to be efficient, because they will likely in the name of efficiency “rationally” set themselves up for inefficiency. This point applies to the last topic I want to touch on here, which is the idea of “standing reserve” found in Heidegger, which I think is an “efficient inefficiency” we see in the lack of drive. Heidegger famously wrote on how the whole world was increasingly being seen as something “ready to be used” for an end like electricity; we see a similar thing with people. They are standing at the register, ready to ring up a product; they are the restaurant, waiting for customers; and so on.
People don’t know when they will be needed at work, and so people can be at work all the time. It’s the most efficient thing to do, funny enough (or else the competition could get an edge…): if we don’t know when people will want x service, then we need to assure x service is always provided at the same spot (so people can learn where to find it), and then more often than not have people ready to provide the service for whenever people might want it. Because we don’t know when people will want things, we have to create consistencies to respond to that want whenever it might arise. This of course means a lot of people spend times at their jobs basically “waiting” — it’s a structural necessity. Ah, but might drive help a change in work culture that allowed people to entertain their drives? I think so.
Drive and “intrinsic motivation” mean there is something people want to do for its own sake, and though not all drives might equally fit into “gaps and moments here and there” (say a drive to skydive), it’s possible that a significant percentage of people could have drives that could fit into windows of downtime at work (especially if those drives were in terms of learning, writing, “social coordination,” and the like). Wouldn’t this be a better use of “human capital” than having people just trying to “look busy”? Sure, people might prioritize their drives over additional sweeping or cooler cleaning that needs to happen, but the overall benefits of enabling drive for “waiting” could outweigh these costs. If drive generates wealth, a Capitalism that allowed people to explore their drives while “waiting” would be more efficient and prosperous than a Capitalism that didn’t for whatever reason (perhaps worried people’s productivity might be hurt…). Perhaps “the structure necessity of waiting” is simply an invitation to cultivate drive, for there is already space for it (especially in an age with the technology of a “social coordination mechanism,” as discussed in II.2)?
A person with drive is a person who entails what they need “within” to avoid being “standing reserve,” and those without drive might actually want to be “standing reserve,” or else they won’t be able to see their use of time as productive. Even if I’m “waiting” at work, at least I’m getting paid. But if I were to have nothing to do and I couldn’t see it as “part of work” — say because I have “buffer time” in my schedule — how do I rationalize that? How do I think of myself then? I could start getting anxious. Suffering questions. Indeed, though “standing reserve” in one sense easily looks like a mistake, from another angle, it could be what we want (Without drive, it only makes sense).
Might our drive make us inefficient though? Might we be distracted at work? Sure, but then we should ask how much value was in the thing we were doing at work if we had to find drive elsewhere and/or if we were so easily swayed away into distraction? In fact, allowing drive at work might be a wonderful way to test the value of that work — though that perhaps is why we don’t want drive at work (we might want to better avoid a test to see if real value is there; we might want to maintain plausible deniability). Also, I think this concern can be overstated, because times of working on drive naturally make space for times to do the other things that need to be done: one provides rest for the other. It just might not be linearly or in a clean sequence though, which is only problematic if we “pay by the hour” — but is that a problem of drive or of how we schedule payments?
In conclusion, I don’t think we can be efficient, rational, or productive without drive, because for one we will misuse time in the name of using it well. Drive makes us more antifragile and likely to schedule our weeks and days in a manner that is ready for the unexpected, as we are more ready for unexpected times at work and/or in general where there is nothing to do, and so on. Without drive, we’re not ready for the unexpected, and if surprises are inevitable in life, perhaps in the name of “a productive society,” to not cultivate drive might be one of the most impractical decisions of all.
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