Efficiency Is My Superpower. Maybe It's Time to Downgrade It to a Strong Skill Set.

Three kids will do that to you. Errands were a military operation. You planned the route, you hit everything in order, you did not backtrack. I knew what I needed, I knew where it was, and I moved through the day like someone who had somewhere to be — because I always did.

I am, to put it plainly, extremely efficient. I have always considered this a virtue.

My husband operates differently. The inefficiency doesn’t register for him. At all.

We went to the framing store recently. I said: wait, we have three other projects — let’s bring them all. He said: I’ll just go back. When I forgot to mention we needed chili crisp for a recipe, he said: no problem, I’ll walk over and get it. I physically cringed. He didn’t notice. He was already putting on his shoes.

Here’s the thing I’ve been sitting with: he doesn’t experience those extra trips as inefficiency. He experiences them as life. He comes back from the chili crisp run having talked to three people, given someone directions, and made plans for coffee with a neighbor. He is not bothered. He is, in fact, delighted.

I have been optimizing my way past a lot of those moments.

The efficiency that got me through those years — the packed schedules, the three kids, the nothing-wasted approach to a day — it served me. It really did. But I don’t have to run that hard anymore. The calendar has space in it now. And I’m realizing that filling every gap, optimizing every errand, is a habit more than a necessity at this point.

I still plan the route. Probably always will. But I’m trying to leave a little room for the detour. The conversation I didn’t schedule. The neighbor I actually stop to talk to. My husband has been doing this for years. Turns out he wasn’t being inefficient. He was just paying attention to different things.

Bloom. is a newsletter for women in their 50s paying attention to exactly this. Find it at getbloom.beehiiv.com.