Is Hyper-Efficiency Stealing Your Joy? – Why Are We Still Doing That?
No Vacation Required
Defining Your Own Success: The Truth About Time, Health, and Money
Why are we still outsourcing the very things that make us feel human? We dive into the "efficiency lie," exploring how our hyper-productive culture tricks us into trading our joy for more work. We challenge the modern habit of optimizing every chore out of our lives, arguing that the time we "save" by ordering delivery or avoiding housework is often filled with more stress rather than the freedom we were promised.
From the surprising link between efficiency and declining health to the realization that we often want freedom more than we want money, this episode is a guide to reclaiming your humanity. Learn why making the "slow" oatmeal or baking your own bread might be the most productive thing you do all day as you build a life you don't need a break from.
Onward and Inward,
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CHAPTERS:
(00:00) Why are we still doing that?
(00:43) Reclaiming your right to define success
(01:33) The struggle with the 24-hour day
(03:56) The efficiency lie: Why outsourcing doesn't save time
(05:59) Finding joy in the "un-optimized" life
(06:56) The link between hyper-efficiency and health
(08:29) Workism: Being efficient just to work more
(10:02) Money vs. Freedom: What we actually want
(11:51) Choosing individualized measures of success
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
The Efficiency Lie: Outsourcing chores and "optimizing" life rarely grants us more time; instead, it often removes the tactile, human activities that regulate our nervous systems and bring us joy.
Workism Awareness: We are often encouraged to be hyper-efficient so that we can fit in more work, eventually working more just to afford to outsource the things we enjoy doing.
Freedom over Currency: Once basic needs are met, the desire for "more money" is usually a masked desire for more freedom. Focus on reclaiming your time and autonomy rather than just a higher balance.
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Kent: Welcome to the No Vacation Required podcast where each episode we ask, why are we still doing that? Building a life you don't need a break from starts by letting go of templated ideas of success. And letting go of templated ideas of success requires each of us to ask, why are we still doing that? Why are we still doing that to the actions we've put on autopilot in the interest of pleasing family, fitting in with friends, and aligning with the dream of the planet.
Welcome to the No Vacation Required podcast.
Caanan: Hi, everybody.
Kent: Where we talk about why are we still doing that? And this is so fun because this is something we've been wanting to do for a long time because some of the things we want to talk about are things that even with each other, we're like, yeah, why are we still doing that? Why are we as people still doing that? So this is our soapbox.
Caanan: This is our soapbox, yeah.
Kent: Interestingly, last time around, we talked about invoking your agency. And we heard a lot from people and clients saying, yeah, that sounds great, but I don't even know what I stand for. So I don't know how I can invoke my agency very effectively when I just numb out and go along.
Caanan: Yeah, it's kind of hard to stand up, stand tall, speak out when you don't know what you stand for. So the feedback was, that was interesting. Not surprising, but interesting.
Kent: Yeah, well, I can't remember if we told you or we didn't tell you that we skipped a very important step because we were very much wanting to talk about invoking your agency. And that's the I in our L-I-F-E philosophy. We just breezed right over the L, and the feedback we got tells us how important it is to talk about that L. And the L is Let go of preconceived notions of success. Let go of the dream of the planet as it applies to what a successful career looks like or what a successful relationship looks like or a successful day or meal or whatever. So yeah, in order to invoke your agency, you have to let go of these ideas of success that are so ingrained in us.
So in that first or in this first post — because we have an accompanying blog post, which we can link to — we introduce this idea that success is yours to define. And since so much of the work we do is with individual people and their career growth and development and work groups, this first post on Substack is about better careers. And let me just say here that there are five areas where people really want to improve their lives. And of course, we say you first have to let go of others' ideas of success. So the first one, the biggest one, the one we work with the most, is people want better careers. So that's what we wrote about. Caanan, I know you have a lot of thoughts based on the feedback we got and just the work we do with clients. What do you think is the most interesting part of that? Or, what have we had the most "oh, wow, I never thought of that" feedback?
Caanan: Yeah, we give some pretty good tips in this post, so do go read it if you haven't had a chance to. But one of the tips that I think is most profound and that people are most surprised by is our tip to have your own measures of success in your career. Essentially not personalizing or internalizing or assimilating the company's goals as your own. This is a foundational piece of our focus on workism. Another thing you can go check out on our Substack if you haven't read about it already. But this idea that you can focus on achieving the corporate goals — you need to do that. We're realistic. You're realistic. You need money. You need to stay in this job. But you don't have to make those goals your own. You don't have to completely become subservient to the corporate objective. What you do is focus on achieving those goals, but internally, secretly, you have a completely different set of KPIs, and they are personal to you. And it really doesn't matter if you hit the corporate goals as long as you're hitting your internal KPIs.
Kent: Two interesting things come to mind with this. It's so interesting what you're saying. I think of all the times when we're doing intake with individuals or teams, and we talk about, what are your goals? What's your goal and your team? And people are very quick to talk about their goal as defined by their company or their leader. And then when we move to the next question and say, okay, so how about your personal goals? Their eyes get big. Like, I can't say that out loud or I can't tell you what I'm really doing here for myself. I mean, oftentimes people have never thought of it and it's a big goosing nothing, but oftentimes they're looking like, "don't ask me that question."
Caanan: Yeah, I think there's a, whether or not people can articulate it, there's a feeling like having internal goals, having your own personal measures of success is like cheating on your company. And it's just the opposite. You can be more effective in your career, which is important, if you have your own measures of success that are completely separate from the company's objectives.
Kent: Yeah, we often ask that question, who is your career for?
Caanan: That's a good one.
Kent: Oh yeah, not for my company, ultimately for me. Okay. We are talking about measures of success and there's this kind of big five things. People want better careers, better relationships, more time, better health, and more money. So this is going to be kind of a multi-phase Substack post, couple podcasts. As we mentioned, we wrote about better careers in our most recent Substack post. And for the bulk of this podcast episode, we're talking about better relationships. This is something, you know, that's in our professional realm over the last few years as we've pivoted to helping people with the personal side of their life and couples with their personal life. And it's something we have a lot of experience in.
Caanan: We don't talk about it much now because it's been a minute, but the 1st 10 years of our relationship, we were very much aligned with — Kent used the term earlier — the dream of the planet.
Kent: Oh yeah, hyper trad.
Caanan: We were hyper trad.
Kent: Never seeing each other.
Caanan: We rarely saw each other. We were intensely upwardly mobile in our careers. We were essentially like winning on all levels except for what ultimately mattered to us, which was spending more time together. So you actually have a good example of what our life looked like at the time.
Kent: Yeah, well, I want to say too, this is something we talk about a lot because this realization 10 years in about a relationship also coincides with the launch of No Vacation Required.
Caanan: Oh yeah.
Kent: So reading previous blog posts and if you pay attention to, or go back to our previous podcast, Stop Hating Mondays, we talk about pieces of this story at different times, not so much the relationship side, which we're getting into now and how we had to define for ourselves what's a better relationship and how, I think unbeknownst to us at the time, it starts with asking, why are we still doing that? Why are we measuring the success of a relationship based on what other people think is the success of a relationship, which is barely seeing each other, complaining about each other when they're not together. That one always gets me.
Caanan: Oh yeah. So much friend group time talking about all your grievances with your partner or your spouse.
Kent: So we had to ask, let's start prioritizing our relationship and not making it fifth, sixth on the list. You know, if you've listened to those prior podcasts or the blog posts I referenced, we talk about the only time we would see each other is when we were doing training runs for a marathon. We were training for the Paris Marathon. So we're getting up in the middle of the night, practically, in order to do these big training runs before the Paris Marathon.
Caanan: But I just want to interject here because you're going to get into this, but to your point about external measures of success, our rarely seeing each other for those 10 years, but making good money and getting promotions and accolades from our employers — our friends and family viewed that as a good relationship.
Kent: Yeah. Yeah.
Caanan: Even though it was actually anathema to our being connected.
Kent: Yeah, so setting the stage. Setting the stage, I had just gotten a new job that we knew Caanan and I knew was going to be very training heavy at first with lots of travel with, I think, a couple three months, yeah, of tons of travel to quote-unquote "get up to speed." Well, many months after that, and that was stressful kind of being away most every week and sometimes for two weeks at a time. I had a certain degree of success, so plans changed and my need to travel also ramped up, which wasn't a huge problem, but it became very last minute. And I'll never forget, there was a particular Friday where I found out I had to be in Chicago on Monday. And this kind of thing had happened a few times before and it was like, oh my gosh, like, no.
But the telling part for us: we found this out on Friday. We had plans with friends and family all through the weekend. So our droopy faces around our family and friends were a giveaway. And we started to talk with them about the hardship of this. And it wasn't hurting our relationship, so to speak, because we've always been very strong. But it was an unwelcome kind of bother. And we noticed, rather than being sympathetic to us for mentioning that this wasn't great for our relationship, all these people wanted to talk about was how exciting it is that I had such an important job that I needed to be in Chicago on Monday.
Caanan: Yeah, like you'd won the lottery by having this disruptive travel schedule for work.
Kent: Well, it's like you said, like our friends and family saw this as a sign of success. So yeah, we're sitting there having brunch. I don't want to name names even of the now gone — in this bustling place, confiding this discomfort and feeling like this is surreal. These people are more excited about the thrill of this job than they are that we've just told them that this is really starting to drain us on a personal level.
Caanan: Yeah. And it's, as you said earlier, it was a critical point for us, a schema breaker, if you will, because here we're sharing something that we feel is unhealthy for our relationship — our inability to plan, our inability to spend time together, how disruptive this job was, despite being high paying and...
Kent: All the things.
Caanan: All those things, all those traditional measures of success. This was a — you were very successful in this job, but it wasn't the right thing for our relationship. And recognizing that people didn't understand that, they could not connect to what we were saying, like, "this job is not healthy for us," was a huge schema break. And what started our No Vacation Required journey.
Kent: Yes. We always talk with our clients about these inflection points, because those were our first signs, like, wait a minute, something's weird here. So that time where we were like, we don't have to look at relationships like everybody else did. In fact, that everybody's so excited that we're stretched in this way for all these great reasons, these great jobs. We need to look at this. So one of the first times we asked, why are we still doing that? And we said, huh, we're not going to do it anymore. So yeah, tried to remedy that situation. They had a different plan for me in this upwardly mobile fashion than I had. And because Caanan and I had decided, why are we still doing this? We have new measures regarding our relationship. We turned the corner. So here we are a decade plus after that, and we are living these nuanced, individualized definitions.
Caanan: Really important moment for us that entire period of our life, as I said, having our schema broken, recognizing that what we wanted for ourselves in our relationship was significantly different than how success, a successful relationship was defined externally. And the way we now measure success — and have for quite a long time now in our relationship — turns out to be fairly disruptive. I'm thinking about the fact, and this is exciting to bring up...
Kent: What?
Caanan: Our... can we talk about our commercial?
Kent: Yes.
Caanan: Okay. Because we talk about this. Yeah. So we recently had the opportunity to do a commercial for the state of Washington, which if you know us, we're big Washington State fans and nature fans. And so this was like pretty much a dream come true for us. This commercial turns out to be kind of documentary style. Less so about the state and more about how our relationship moves in this state. But it was pretty fun because we got to talk about our take on relationships. What success looks like in a relationship.
Kent: And Caanan, what did you tell the people?
Caanan: That the traditional ideas of romance and relationships are really backwards. That this is coming from two guys who have a lifetime of big life-changing moments. Those are not what make for a great relationship. In fact, they are secondary and sometimes in contradiction to the true measures of an effective relationship, which are the little moments. And there's a point in the commercial where Kent says something truly profound, if I don't say so myself, where he says, "It's in the small moments. It's here. It's here."
Kent: Yeah, I'm basically saying that there's no grand trick to a healthy relationship, which is what everybody wants to know. That in fact, our definition of a successful relationship is in all the little moments. And we say, yeah, it's here. It's here. Meaning it's right now in this moment. It's right now in the next moment. It's in the moment right in front of you. And those are usually the small moments. And Caanan goes on to say that having that kind of connection and appreciating all the moments, then makes it easier when the tough times come along.
Caanan: Yes, that the tough times become romantic because you get to go through those times together. And to that point, I just want to say that that moment where we both realized 10 years into our relationship that the way we were focused on our careers, our upwardly mobile idea of success — when we both realized that no longer held value to us and collectively decided to do something about it, to make a bold change and redefine relationship for ourselves, that is probably one of the most romantic things that's ever happened in our life. And that is the sign of a good relationship, for sure.
Kent: So the bottom line here is that you get to decide what success looks like. Success in work, and as we just talked about, success in relationships. Funnily, regarding the relationship thing, we talk about the Cabo girls.
Caanan: The Cabo girls.
Kent: Yeah, we were in Cabo on vacation within the last couple of years, and there's a big wedding happening. All the bridesmaids were hanging around by us at the pool one day and like woke us up to ask us what this one should do regarding this guy she was dating, who they defined as a loser. And we were saying, like, why would you say this guy's a loser? It was completely based on a job. He doesn't have a job that's good enough for Molly or whatever her name was.
Caanan: Yeah, it was extraordinarily basic in terms of measuring somebody's worth.
Kent: So we gave these margarita-fueled flight attendants from Atlanta the lesson of a lifetime and they really appreciated it. And they said like, "we have never heard this before because our parents are insistent that we only marry up. We only need to marry successful," and that is defined by a job. So we're here to tell you, you better ask, why are we still doing that? Because you get to decide what your measures of success are.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the No Vacation Required podcast. If you want a life you don't need a break from, a life where you live from a place of commitment and not comfort, join us for regular new episodes where you can always count on us to find a tired tradition and to ask, why are we still doing that? And if you're ready for change, come find us at thechangelaboratory.com.