My Love of Efficiency, Explained: Part Temperament, Part Conditioning

Once a week for over three years now, I’ve worked on a prep day at a local food bank. The dozen or so people I work with are long time employees and people placed in part-time jobs through AARP or refugee support agencies. We sort, cull, bag, re-bag and stack: everything goes in 6-gallon plastic crates for easy access when the “line” opens the next day. Prepping a palate of apples is appealing to me: left hand opens a box lid; right hand pulls the tape off. Left hand grabs a plastic bag, while right hand snuggles around three apples. You get the picture.

Last week, three women (Eritrean, Congolese & Vietnamese; the fact that they’re not American-born is relevant) largely communicating through gestures, sped our way through a pallet of hand sanitizer. We had a lovely choreography going: opening, emptying, breaking down boxes, while stacking and shuffling plastic crates.  They were a lot of smiles. Soon one of the managers (a man from Sierra Leone), came by. “Why are you done already?” he asked in a curious tone. “Now what are you going to do? Why go fast? Slow is good. Now you will stand around with nothing to do!”

I was shocked. I don’t believe I’ve ever been in a work situation where I’ve been instructed to slow down and be less productive. I loved how the admonition shakes up my whole concept of work—and what I find fun. I’ve always believed it’s my love of geometric order that feeds my inclination toward ‘efficient’ movement sequences…but perhaps it’s 61 years of conditioning in a capitalist culture. Do I love a low effort order of movements because it feels good, or because I’ve received so much reinforcement about the glory of productivity, the joy of efficiency, the beauty of a smooth running system?

I know it’s neither one or the other. It’s not just my innate love of orderly patterns, and it’s not just how I’ve internalized capitalist priorities. It’s both—and the two influences intermingle in ways I’m working to reveal. The important thing now is that I don’t feel guilty or ashamed about my love of Moroccan tiles, handmade quilts, or a bottom sheet folded with minimal moves (or frustration). It’s important that I pay attention to how some of the warm feeling in my sternum is stirred by being a good, productive cog in our economic system, which perpetuates it and all its inequities. This allows me to start teasing apart what’s mine, what I’ve adopted, and what I want to shift.

Meantime, I’ll just gaze at my logo image.

June 2023 Back to Blog Home

8”x10” Altair design, magic marker on paper, from 1972

Leftover Mexican tiles from my kitchen backsplash

A quilt that should have won 1st Place at the Evergreen State Fair

aaaahhhhhhh photo credit: Andrew Riley

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