TO: A fellow lawyer with inbox fatigue and a to-do list that breeds overnight

FROM: Midweek Owl 🦉 (your advocate against the tyranny of “getting it all done”)

RE: The invisible trap hidden inside your productivity tools

Let’s say you finally reduce your inbox from 137 to 11.

You lean back, satisfied.

Then ping you’ve got mail. Again.

By the end of the day, you’re back at 137.

Welcome to the modern retelling of the myth of Sisyphus: pushing your email boulder up the hill, only to have it roll back into your inbox by COB.

Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, calls this the efficiency trap.

And if you’ve ever tried to “get on top of things” by reorganising your calendar, batching your inbox, or powering through your to-do list with military precision: you’ve already met it.

What is the Efficiency Trap?

At first glance, it sounds harmless. Efficiency means doing things faster, right?

But here’s the catch.

The more efficient you become, the more demands you attract. You respond quickly to emails, so more people email you. You create a faster workflow, so more tasks get sent your way. Your efficiency earns trust, which often means you’re looped in more, not less.

Instead of freeing up time, your efficiency creates more work. And the harder you try to “fit everything in,” the less time you have for the work that actually matters.

As Burkeman puts it, “Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.”

Grounds for Concern

The trap isn’t just about quantity. It’s about quality.

When you believe it should be possible to make time for everything, you stop asking whether a task is even worth doing in the first place. Suddenly, your week fills with tasks you didn’t plan:

Quick responses, last-minute handovers, or recurring meetings that seem to run on muscle memory.

Burkeman again: “You become a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations.”

And in law? That’s an open invitation to burnout; not brilliance.

We keep telling ourselves that once we’re efficient enough, the real work (the meaningful, high-impact work) will finally have room to breathe.

But it doesn’t work that way. Efficiency rewards you with more tasks, not more space. And slowly, we start spending our sharpest hours on the least meaningful things, all while telling ourselves we’re being “productive.”

The Remedy

Burkeman doesn’t argue against efficiency. He argues against its worship.

Because when productivity becomes a way of life, not just a tool, it quietly reshapes how we measure worth: by output, response time, and availability. Not by impact, meaning, or clarity.

The alternative isn’t to abandon efficiency.

It’s to reclaim discernment.

It’s to pause long enough to ask: Why am I doing this? Who is it for? And what am I giving up to keep doing it?

Burkeman’s invitation is simple but subversive: Get less done, more meaningfully.

This doesn’t mean slacking off. It means choosing. It means resisting the lure of inbox heroics, and remembering that the best work (the kind that builds reputation, fulfilment, and trust) rarely happens in a rush.

Your Honour, I Reflect

For this week’s brief reflection, consider: which parts of your workload continue by default, not by design?

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That’s all from me!

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With steady wings,

Midweek Owl 🦉