If you forget something, then you didn’t need to know it

Contrast is the great efficiency gainer.

It’s only when we’re forced to stop doing something we always did that we realize just how little we needed to do it in the first place.

During the pandemic, many organizations become highly adept at conducting virtual meetings, presentations, events and other remote work. And they quickly discovered a few truths.

First, productivity didn’t plummet like they assumed it would. Teams were significantly more efficient with their work. In the absence of classically stressful workplace formalities like commuting, meetings, office distractions and wearing pants, now it was easier to focus on doing what mattered.

People never realized just how much of their valuable time was wasted until they suddenly had an overabundance of it. They had nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there, and their priorities came into perspective.

The next pandemic discovery for most organizations was, the cost savings was extraordinary. Consider the business events industry. These companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year bringing together large groups of people from around the world to essentially change nothing.

It’s a colossal misuse of time, money and labor. Has been for decades.

I spent my first career hopping from conference to conference giving speeches, and while it was an enjoyable and profitable way to make a living, let’s face it. None of those events were essential. The amount of resources companies pissed away for those events could have been much more usefully deployed.

A final learning from the contrast of the pandemic was, it held up a mirror to our society’s addiction to excess.

My firm, for example, closed our office like most companies did. The executives boxed up everyone’s belongings and put them into storage for the foreseeable future.

And sure enough, within a few weeks of starting remote work, all of us had already forgotten what those belongings were.

We realized that all the crap on our desks, on the walls and around our workspace was completely superfluous. It wasn’t essential for doing our jobs. The forced downsizing showed us that we didn’t need as much to thrive as we assumed.

These three trends prove that contrast is the great efficiency gainer. It’s like the first time you do an intermittent fast. You’re liberated by the fact that you don’t need as much food as you once thought.

Fasting recalibrates your hunger demand signals. It makes you realize that you’re not actually hungry most of the time, you’re just bored, lonely, tired or angry.

What’s something you were forced to stop doing that you now see you shouldn’t have even been doing in the first place?