The efficiency trap turns work speed into isolation

A new look at working motherhood argues that the drive for “ruthless efficiency” can deliver immediate productivity while quietly shrinking relationships and career momentum over time—an experience reflected both in personal life and in research responses.

When the door to an office stays open, conversations find you. When it closes, work gets done—faster. After her daughter was born. the author describes doing exactly that: not through any public announcement. but by closing her office door to gain more time. especially with daycare pickup already fixed into her schedule.

Before motherhood. she had kept that door ajar at a tenure-track business school professor’s pace—guided by “professional faith” that hallway talk helped ideas take shape. goodwill accumulate. and careers grow. After motherhood arrived, that same hallway availability became something she could no longer afford. Her days tightened into what a research participant later described as “ruthless efficiency. ” a way of triaging every interaction as either necessary or not.

The problem wasn’t that the strategy didn’t work. It did. The problem was what it cost.

In her research, she found that pattern repeatedly among working mothers who had recently returned from maternity leave. As she sifted through open-ended survey responses. the same language surfaced again and again: women describing having to become “ruthlessly efficient” simply to keep their professional lives intact.

They couldn’t stay late for happy hours or linger over lunch, and every interaction had to justify itself. One participant wrote, “I don’t socialize, like, at all.” Another said, “I was more direct, spending less time trying to be nice . . . I didn’t have time for ‘making nice’ anymore.”

The author and her co-authors describe mixed reactions to what this meant. On one hand. the efficiency these women were developing was transferable—an ability organizations could benefit from—and it was helping mothers stay in their jobs during a period known for its precarious effects on mothers’ career continuation. She points to a prior argument. including work she and co-authors wrote in HBR. that framed these skills as competitive advantages organizations could gain when employers better support working mothers.

On the other hand, the tradeoffs were difficult to ignore. The research documented thinning work relationships and fraying informal networks—the kind that don’t show up on organizational charts but can shape who gets promoted. One participant captured the bargain in blunt terms: “Time-wise I have had to become more efficient. but that has meant focusing on the tangible aspects of the job . . . I do what I need to do to keep my job. I don’t have time to do the things that might progress my career.”.

In the author’s framing, the closed door delivers visible and immediate benefits—more output within a finite window—but the costs are “invisible and deferred.” That imbalance is the core mechanism behind what she calls the efficiency trap.

A key complication is the moment many workers describe: unprecedented time pressure, “always on,” perpetually connected, and chronically overworked. The author says that when people feel they’re drowning. they reach for whatever seems to float—without pausing to ask what they might be releasing as they grab on. She doesn’t dismiss that urgency. Her concern is that pressure makes it easier to mistake ruthlessness for resourcefulness.

Her proposal is a distinction between sustainable efficiency and ruthless efficiency. Sustainable efficiency is what happens when you streamline something genuinely unnecessary—cut busywork. automate the tedious—so human attention can go where it is irreplaceable. It creates lasting value. Ruthless efficiency. she says. is different: cutting corners on relationships. skipping the deliberation that protects against error. or sacrificing quality for speed. With ruthless efficiency, short-term gain wins without accounting for long-term loss. With sustainable efficiency, both are at least weighed.

She also ties the dilemma to “slack.” Since Frederick Winslow Taylor. she notes. organizations pursued efficiency partly by eliminating idle time—the gaps and wandering that don’t show up as production. But for creative work and knowledge work, she argues, slack is not waste. It is “the medium in which insight forms.” The hallway conversations she stopped having made her more efficient with immediate tasks. but they also cost relationships. contextual knowledge. and social awareness of what was happening in her organization—things that don’t register on a daily productivity ledger yet matter over a career.

The author stresses that the efficiency trap isn’t really an argument against being efficient. The question is what people are willing to sacrifice for it, and whether they’re making that choice with their eyes open.

She says she still closes her office door sometimes. The time-crunching pressures that pushed her to do it haven’t disappeared. But now. she tries to ask the question she didn’t ask then: what is she actually trading for this—what hallway conversation might have produced. what relationship she isn’t building. and what capability she isn’t developing.

It isn’t whether to pursue efficiency. It is whether the price is faced honestly.

efficiency trap ruthless efficiency sustainable efficiency working mothers maternity leave workplace networks productivity slack knowledge work career progression