Greatness is inefficient

Transcript

The ideal is quality AND quantity, but face it. You’re only human. This is higher ed hot takes and I am Joel Goodman.

Work smarter, not harder. This old adage has helped many of us do our jobs better. If you’re an oldie, maybe that meant setting up macros in your word processor for actions you needed to repeat all the time. Maybe it meant setting up labels and folders in your email inbox and using rules to sort incoming messages. Or maybe it's using tools like zapier to automate different tasks.

Efficiency saves us a lot of time energy. In a bakery or factory, being efficient with motion can reduce strain and toll on your body. In digital work, you can prevent carpal tunnel or feel a little more superhuman with productivity hacks.

Efficiency is good then. And it’s helped the world accomplish a lot. Episode over.

What was I talking about?

So there’s a dark side to creating all of this extra time. Efficiency has an insatiable hunger for time. Any time saved has to be filled with more production. And you have to make that production more efficient. This is bad.

In higher ed this shows its face as “doing more with less.” You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. If we’re honest you’re probably living it three or four times over. And the only answer is to be more efficient! The problem is that you’ve exhausted all the productivity hacks and don’t have any more time outside of what are supposed to be normal work hours to get more stuff done.

In 2025, the answer is AI. (Hahahahahaha)

Sorry, that’s ridiculous. And I know it’s being sold to you that way, but it’s a lie. See there’s a point where efficiency just produces diminishing returns, especially in a field where quality is all that differentiates your institution from the one down the street.

We’ve been so distracted by the shiny AI marketing, sales pitches, and addictive product design that we let a lot of really bad, sometimes awful, output slide. I hear more and more often how marketing professionals are using ChatGPT — the most popular LLM product, serving the most general range of people, trained on the most mainstream available content — to do writing for them.

And I’m just going to posit this question — if you take an objective step back, is the quality of that output as good or better than content you used to write the old fashioned way?

Follow-up. Do you believe that a predictive text model trained on the lowest common denominator of content is capable of stringing together some words that will be effective in a highly competitive market?

Here’s the hard truth. Quality performs better than quantity. There’s no point adding to the slop unless you have no intention of standing out. AI-generated ad imagery? Underperforms compared to carefully designed campaigns. AI-generated content? Typically has to be rewritten multiple times. AI-built code? Woof, don’t get me started.

Creative work is inefficient. And inefficiency produces better quality. Doing more with less is never as good as doing better with less.

When efficiency is chased at all costs, we end up misplacing quality. We end up promoting sloppy work, producing literal slop. And that hurts our brands, our students, and our people.

In competitive fields like higher ed — I know I’ve said this before — but our people are all we have to differentiate us. To compete we have to stop playing to the mean, and to do that we have to reclaim our core human characteristics.

Quality comes from allocating time to the right processes. Taking the time to listen, process, consider, and apply what we know might be less efficient than asking an LLM to generate an idea — but nine times out of ten it’s going to produce better, more original thought than that model will.

Here’s something else to think about. Today in 2025, the quote DOGE model of government overhaul is being bandied about globally. Ostensibly this is about increasing government efficiency while ignoring the fact that government is inefficient by design. Democracy and public participation in government must be inefficient. Total efficiency means no participation. No questioning, no auditing, no new ideas, no by and for the people.

This is the core of my argument today. There is a point when the quest for efficiency cancels out any sense of art or creativity. There is no thinking or considering or challenging when we outsource to machines the very spark that makes us human.

So consider closely the things you choose to automate. Make sure you aren't passing the things that need your unique take on them over to software. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that just because an LLM can mimic your writing style that it's good enough for rock and roll. It's only low quality simulacra. It's soulless, lacking all aura. And you deserve better than to have a cheap knockoff of your own brilliance out in the world masquerading as the real thing.

Have I convinced you yet? I know I probably haven't. So let me try with one more thing. We only have so many pieces of our humanity to give away before we lose it entirely. What happens when, for efficiency's sake, we forget how to write, how to code, how to design, how to tell stories? What happens when our core creative spark is completely mediated by LLMs, generative models, and huge corporations serving their bottom lines?

There's an argument floating around that the AI boom (lol) isn't going to take people's jobs, it's just going to change them. And I agree — the AI boom makes us worse at our jobs, makes our work more generic, and encourages us to forget the things that make us unique in favor of conformity and hegemony.

Quality is inefficient. Craft is inefficient. Brilliance is inefficient. Art is messy and inefficient. Let’s face it, humans are inefficient. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Thanks for listening. Connect with me, Joel Goodman on Bluesky or LinkedIn. Direct links are at higher ed hot takes dot com.