Making space for inefficiency

There is a particular kind of tired that comes from moving at a pace set by external circumstances and structures.

You know the one. The day chopped into fifty minute blocks. The note that has to be done before the next person walks in. The quiet arithmetic running underneath everything, how many sessions or hours it takes to make the month work. And somewhere in there, the feeling that the work has become something to get through cleanly rather than something to be inside.

I want to make a case for inefficiency. Not as a treat. Not as the self care you're allowed once the productive part is finished. As the actual material the work is made of.

Think about where the real things happen. The pause you didn't fill. The session that wandered and arrived somewhere neither of you planned. The thread you followed because it was alive, not because it was on the plan. Trust that built at the speed trust builds, which is to say slowly, and never on schedule. None of that is efficient. All of it is the work. We keep calling these moments the soft parts, the extra, the stuff that happens around the real intervention. They are the real intervention.

And then there's the part I most want to defend, because it's the part most easily cut: imagination. The wondering. The letting an idea sit unfinished. The doodling in the margins of a case, the what if I tried it this way, the hour that looks from the outside like nothing is being produced. This is not downtime between the useful things. This is where we think. It's where a practitioner becomes more than a delivery mechanism for someone else's protocol. The field doesn't grow from optimization. It grows from people with enough unmetered room to imagine something that doesn't exist yet, and the systems that meter our days don't just exhaust us, they quietly foreclose the exact conditions the work needs to keep becoming itself.

There's a particular ache in this for our line of work. Most of us spend our days urging the people we care for and work with toward rest. Toward self acceptance, forgiveness, peace, self compassion, the recognition of common humanity. We say it with our whole hearts because we believe it. And then we get up from the chair and move at a pace that allows for none of it in our own lives. Not because we don't mean what we say, but because the day we've been handed has no room in it for us to live inside our own counsel. You can't extend to yourself what you're given no space to practice. Making room for inefficiency is, among other things, what it would take to finally walk alongside the people we serve rather than only pointing the way.

Here is what I don't want to do, though. I don't want to defend slowness by promising it pays off. The moment I tell you to make room for imagination because look how it advances the field, I've handed the whole argument back to the logic I'm trying to push against. Imagination doesn't need to earn its place by being secretly productive. It belongs to the work because the work is human. That the field happens to grow from it is something we notice afterward, gratefully. It is not the receipt that justifies the time.

So when I say make space, I want to be careful about who I'm talking to. If you are running six sessions back to back to cover your rent, the absence of room in your day is not a character flaw, and it's not something a better morning routine fixes. The tempo you're moving at was installed. It came from managed care and productivity metrics and a culture that decided care work should be counted the way widgets are counted. You did not choose this pace. It was handed to you, and then you were told the strain was yours to manage.

Which is why I think of this less as time management and more as reclamation. Making room for inefficiency is taking back a piece of the work that was quietly taken from you, the piece where you get to be a thinking, imagining, unhurried person doing relational work, rather than a unit of throughput. Room for humanity, where work is not one more place you are not quite doing or being enough.

This is also, plainly, part of why EMBER (link) exists. Building something of your own, outside the institution that metered you, is itself an act of imagination that the optimized world will never make space for. You have to make that space on purpose.

EMBER opens for registration again August 1st. If you'd like to be the first to know when doors open, you can add your name to the waitlist (link) and get an additional discount. No decision to make yet. Just a way to keep the door in view while you make space for the kind of imagining it takes to build something of your own.