Amanda Burbage

 Why Trying to Get Everything Done is Making Us Miserable

If there’s one universal feeling shared among college students (and honestly, adults in general), it’s the constant sense that we’re running out of time. No matter how many productivity hacks we try, the to-do list never gets any shorter. In fact, it seems that the harder we try to optimize all these tasks, the more they seem to pile up. Reading Oliver Burkeman’s chapter “The Efficiency Trap” in Four Thousand Weeks made me realize something I’d always felt but was never able to fully articulate: our obsession with efficiency isn’t actually helping us at all and is instead quietly making our lives worse.

Burkeman’s argument is simple. Every time we become more efficient at an activity, our expectations for our future performance rise right along with our new abilities. Instead of freeing up our schedules with this saved time, we just create more space for new tasks. If you’re like me, this might make you feel a little uncomfortable. No one wants to be told that all their effort is going to waste and they’re not actually accomplishing everything that they think they are. I went into this chapter pretty skeptical, but Burkeman’s argument is definitely worth hearing out because what you learn might surprise you.

The Productivity Paradox

We live in a culture that equates productivity with virtue. If you’re not constantly doing something useful (or at least pretending to be), you’re made to feel guilty. Much-needed rest starts to feel like procrastination, and free time starts to feel like wasted time. Burkeman uses the email example to demonstrate this. Maybe you set aside some time in your day to sit down and go through all of your emails, reading and replying to each and every message. Once you reach the end of the list, you feel proud of yourself for finally getting through it all. But the second you empty out your inbox, you get another email, and then another and another, and sooner or later it looks like you never accomplished anything. Cleaning out your inbox won’t bring you lasting peace, because all it does it create more space for more emails to pile up.

Burkeman argues that this is the heart of the efficiency trap: the faster you work, the more work appears to take its place. We imagine that if we just find the right system or the right schedule, we’ll finally get everything handled. But this fantasy is what keeps us trapped, because the truth is, there will never be a moment when everything is done. Life doesn’t work that way, and it’s high time that we stop deluding ourselves into thinking it does. The more we chase that impossible moment where we have nothing left to do, the more stressed and dissatisfied we become with our lives.

The Myth of “One Day, When I Have Time…”

A part of the chapter that really struck me was Burkeman’s point about how we often postpone the most meaningful stuff. We tell ourselves we’ll get to it eventually, once we finish all the “urgent” things like getting rid of our email pop-up notifications (that just keep coming no matter what!). We want to be able to focus all of our energy on the things that are most important to us, so we push them off because we claim we don’t have the time. Think about your own life. What’s something you keep postponing because you “don’t have time”? Starting a creative project? Calling someone you miss? Reading for fun? Just taking a walk without your phone?

Be honest: Do you really believe there will be a day in the future when you wake up and suddenly have unlimited time and energy? Or is that just something you tell yourself so you don’t have to face the uncomfortable truth? Burkeman suggests that we avoid these important tasks not because we don’t have time for them, but because they feel intimidating. We want to have the luxury of giving them our full attention, but because we rarely have that ideal time window, we just keep neglecting the things that are most important to us and push them into some imaginary future where our schedules are infinitely spacious and our minds are calm. But that future never materializes, because life doesn’t slow down just because we wish it would.

Convenience Culture and the Illusion of Saving Time

Another part of the chapter that interested me was Burkeman’s critique of convenience culture. Everything around us is designed to be effortless: online shopping, food delivery, high-speed internet. But Burkeman argues that easy doesn’t always mean better. Convenience strips away the parts of life that make our experiences more meaningful. Think about cooking a meal from scratch versus doordashing. One is much quicker (and when I’ve had a long day, this option is very tempting); all you have to do is get up to open the door and suddenly you have dinner. Cooking dinner requires you to gather and prepare the ingredients, have a recipe in mind, put a lot more effort into it than it would take to order takeout. Yet which one leaves you feeling more satisfied? There’s something deeply human about doing things the long way, the slow way, the inconvenient way. It forces us to show up and be present in the moment. It gives us stories and moments worth remembering. Convenience may save time, but it often costs us something harder to measure.

Making Peace With the Unfinished

My big takeaway from this chapter is that we need to stop believing that peace comes from finally getting on top of everything. That day will never come, and it’s time that we accept that. It doesn’t have to be a tragedy; that’s just life. Once we acknowledge that we have a finite amount of time on Earth and there’s no possible way we’ll ever to experience everything that we want to, there’s a certain peace that comes with that. We will always miss out on far more than we experience. Our inboxes will always refill, and our to-do lists will always grow. 

This may seem daunting, but if we accept this as an inevitable fact of life, we will finally be able to breathe. Burkeman’s solution isn’t to continue to work faster and smarter, but to work more deliberately. We need to stop getting caught up in the small, inconsequential things like emails and chase our passions, because that’s what really matters. We need to act with intention so that at the end of the day, we can feel a sense of pride that we prioritized and chose to do what was most important.

That’s the real escape from the efficiency trap: not squeezing more into your schedule, but choosing what’s worth putting in your schedule at all. Once you accept that you won’t get everything done, the pressure to do so melts away. You stop trying to live your life like it’s a race against a clock and give yourself permission to focus, rest, and be more present. Your time is precious, so why don’t you treat it that way?

So What Do We Do Now?

Burkeman doesn’t offer us any life hacks that magically solve everything. His message is simple: we only have so much time. Use it well by paying attention to the things that actually matter to you.