Category: Optimization

I’ve always struggled with a morning routine. I’ve never liked getting up early, although I like being up early, and I’ve also never needed to be up early for my job as a software engineer. However, there’s enough evidence of the benefits of getting up early and having some time set aside in the morning before starting work that I’ve wanted to find a way to accomplish this for myself, so this year I set about developing a morning routine as an experiment.

This past summer, I listed to an episode of A Better Life with Brandon Turner featuring Hal Elrod, who wrote a book called The Miracle Morning. Full disclosure: I haven’t actually read the book. But, in the podcast episode, Hal shared the core principles laid out in his book, and it was inspiring to me in its simplicity and practicality.

As I’ve mentioned before, having systems in place works really well for me, especially when they’re reduced to their essentials and kept simple. I decided to attempt developing a morning routine for myself based on the Miracle Morning principles, starting with setting my alarm for 7:30am (instead of 8am, or no alarm at all).

In order to ensure I actually get up when my alarm goes off, I have my alarm sitting on my dresser across the bedroom, so when it goes off in the morning, I have to actually get up and walk over to the dresser to turn it off. This is the first “hack” I implemented to get myself up and going in the morning.

Once I’m up, I’m already standing at my dresser, so I get dressed, grab my phone, AirPods, and notebook, and slip out of the bedroom (my wife is usually still asleep at this point).

The rest of my routine consists of a list of tasks:

• Drink a glass of water
• Go to the bathroom
• Brush my hair
• Make coffee
• Do devotions
• Do DuoLingo
• Make to-do list
• Empty compost
• Feed animals
• Make breakfast

Hal Elrod talks about a couple of key points to getting a successful start to your day: getting rehydrated, since we’re typically dehydrated after effectively fasting for 8 hours; and staying on your feet for as long as possible first thing in the morning. I’ve found now that if I skip drinking a glass of water first thing, I feel noticeably parched.

I’ve revised my routine a couple of times now, and I’m still working out some kinks, such as if and when to make breakfast, and if it should be for just me or for my whole family (who usually aren’t up yet). The beauty of a system is that it can be iterated upon and optimized, and it gets me a little excited that I can play around with it and constantly tweak it to make it work well for me. One really cool feature of this morning routine is that I’m essentially building a habit, and with habits, you can do habit stacking. So once I had a basic framework, it was easy to tack on additional tasks that I’d like to get done in the morning (like emptying the compost).

So far, my morning routine has been surprisingly successful. I’ve slowly set my alarm earlier and earlier since I started, and I’m now waking up at 6am and have a lot more time before I start work—in fact, I’m writing this blog post before anyone else is awake.

I’ve also been trying to focus on enjoying the ritual of my morning routine, rather than viewing it as a highly optimized list of tasks to get done as quickly as possible. Slowing down and being more intentional about each task helps me to be more thoughtful about the work and have a greater appreciation for what I’m doing.

As I continue to optimize my morning routine, I’ve begun thinking about developing an evening routine to support my morning routine—things like filling the kettle the night before and tidying the house to prepare for the next day. More on this in the future.

If you’re curious for more discussion about morning routines, I also talked about this on my podcast.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Perhaps, then, a certain type of laziness is the fun uncle? Like I said in my first post on optimization, as an engineer, I’m driven to optimize, to make things work better. But I think there is a secondary force in operation here: a drive to work less—at least, to work less on uninteresting things.

One could make the argument that this is actually still a form of optimization, just at a higher level: that I’m optimizing my time to work more on interesting things and less on uninteresting things. This sort of meta-optimization is at the core of what I am calling the Lazy Engineer (the group of which I consider myself to be a member).

The Lazy Engineer doesn’t want to waste time on uninteresting tasks, therefore he optimizes those tasks to automate them and free up more of his time for interesting tasks. But there is an even higher level to this meta-optimization for the Lazy Engineer: he also doesn’t want to waste too much time optimizing, so he optimizes his optimizations for time spent.

The guiding principle for this meta-meta-optimization is the Pareto principle, also commonly called the 80/20 rule. In this context, the application is this: find the 20% of a task that accounts for 80% of its outcomes, and build a system around that. Don’t waste time optimizing for the remaining 20% of outcomes, because that last 20% will take 80% of the time to optimize.

Essentially, as a Lazy Engineer, I’m seeking that tipping point to maximize the effect of optimizations before reaching diminishing returns, and then calling it Good Enough. This goes back to the idea of seeking out the core principles of a task and focusing on optimizing those, effectively ignoring secondary outcomes and fringe benefits. By cutting out the fat and the fluff, these meta-optimized processes become simple, lean, and efficient. Perhaps one could call it Minimalist Optimization, but I think it’s more fitting to call it Lazy Optimization: the favorite tool of the Lazy Engineer.

Three years ago, we suddenly became “pool people”. When we purchased our current house, it came with a very large in-ground pool, and, of course, pool care duty fell to yours truly. I have now spent the last three years learning water chemistry, fine-tuning variable speed pumps, and fighting suction to take care of this pool, not to mention replacing—and paying to replace—various parts. They aren’t kidding when they call pools money pits.

To optimize my pool care routine, I’ve been compiling a list of principles and developing a system to remove a bulk of the burden of “figuring it out as I go.”

First, I have a Google Doc with core information and principles for pool care. These include things like the size of our pool (37,000 gallons), how many 3″ chlorine tabs to add at a time, and how many pounds of sodium bicarbonate to add to our pool to raise the alkalinity 10 ppm. I can use this document as a reference whenever I need to make adjustments to the water. It also has a schedule for pool care activities, such as how frequently to brush the sides or shock the pool.

Second, I have a spreadsheet that I use to track how much of what chemicals I’m adding to the pool and when, as well as my purchases of those chemicals. This allows me to calculate total and average usage and cost of each chemical over the course of the pool season. My goal here is to help refine my understanding of the water balancing needs of our pool, which will be reflected in the first document, and also to help prepare for next season by allowing me to buy more chemicals in bulk rather than running to the pool store on a regular basis throughout the season.

Finally, based on the schedule of various tasks outlined in the first document, I have actual calendar events on my calendar to help me stay on top of the pool care regimen. Currently, I just have a single recurring daily event for “Pool care,” and then reference the document to see which specific tasks I need to do, but my plan to refine this a bit further with more specific calendar events based on the schedule to avoid having to reference the document while I’m out at the pool.

This system is definitely still a work in progress and not complete, but it has certainly helped me stay more on top of pool care this season compared to previous seasons, and my hope is that, as I continue to refine it, it makes future seasons even easier (and hopefully cheaper, too).

I have to give credit to Swim University, run by Matt Giovanisci, whose articles, cheat sheets, and videos have really simplified pool care for me.

I also have to give credit to our local pool store, who take care of opening and closing our pool each season, installed our new liner, and supply our chemicals. They have been very helpful when I’ve run into issues with the pool or had questions about balancing the water.

In my last post, I talked about the value of leveraging systems to effectively automate optimizations. I’d like to dig more into the concept of systems and how they can be set up and used effectively.

A system may be defined as “a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized framework or method” (Oxford English Dictionary). When designing a system to optimize a process, I try to suss out the core principles of that process—to break it down to its bare necessities—and build the system around those. Everything else is gravy. If I can turn those core principles into direct, specific action steps, often on a specific schedule (think S.M.A.R.T. goals), then I have a practical system that I can use to perform that process reliably, repeatedly, and without expending a lot of brain energy.

When I talk about automating optimizations, I’m not so much talking about having a machine do it all for me (although that is sometimes very helpful), but rather triggering automatic thinking. If I can develop a system, which becomes a routine, which becomes a habit, and I can perform the process with minimal conscious decision-making, then I would consider that process automated in this context. Consider driving home from work on your normal route, and arriving home not remembering any of the drive itself—that’s automatic thinking: the commute home has become an unconscious habit that doesn’t require very much conscious decision-making.

Whenever I find myself doing a process repeatedly, especially if it requires decision-making, I try to turn it into a simple system. Usually, I document that system somewhere (a notebook, a Google Doc, etc.) and fine-tune it over time until it’s working well for me. Developing a system is most definitely an iterative process, refining it until it reduces more friction than it creates.

Here are some books that have been very useful to me as I think about developing systems:

• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan

I’ve recently developed a renewed interest in the FIRE movement. I’ve followed Mr. Money Mustache off and on for about 10 years now, and gone through periods of time of being very excited about the possibility of financial independence, but unfortunately I never seriously put any of the advice into practice, leaving me on a more typical American career and financial path to date.

My wife and I have followed Dave Ramsey’s financial principles since before we were married, which has provided us a really solid framework and language to talk about money together. I highly recommend his Financial Peace University course (we’ve taken it twice). However, his plan is for living financially secure on a typical career path—not achieving financial independence early.

I’ve realized recently that a big reason I have failed to implement more of these FIRE strategies is a lack of systems. I talk with my wife a lot about having systems for things, because they allow me to effectively offload thinking and externalize decision-making. If I can put a system in place that I know and understand, ideally it will for me without me having to think about it going forward. But I found there was a big gap when it came to our finances: I was implementing very few systems to keep us on track, much less to get ahead and move more quickly towards financial independence.

Thinking about this more, especially in this day and age, it’s very easy to set up systems that automate optimizing your finances. The first thing I did was set up a recurring auto-transfer to move money into savings—we currently have a goal of building a bigger emergency fund. Looking back, this is an absolute no-brainer, but we were missing our target month after month because we were not paying ourselves first. Now, it happens automatically, and I won’t have to think about anymore (until we hit our emergency fund goal, at which point I’ll redirect those funds).

Another system that we already do have in place, but are still working to optimize, is having a separate checking account for my wife. The idea is for it to operate similar to Dave Ramsey’s paper envelope system, where we transfer money into that checking account for groceries and other spending each month, and she can spend out of that account without having to keep track of all the receipts. So far, this seems to be working for the most part, except when I forget to transfer money in, or something comes up and she needs more money than is available and just uses the main checking account. So, to optimize this a bit further, I now have an auto-transfer set up to drop money in there each month, and we’ve agreed to discuss any budget adjustments as they come up, in which case we may transfer additional funds into that account.

Finally, I also had the idea of getting account balance texts sent to our phones each day, so we know how much is available in the “envelope” account. However, I couldn’t find a service that offers this—some specific banks do, but not ours. So, that’s not in place yet, but I may end up building a tool to do it…

I’ve also spent time over the years tweaking our budget categories and the annual budget spreadsheet to eke out more efficiencies and usefulness. This minor tweaks are part of the ongoing optimization process to make managing our finances more and more simple and intuitive. The more I can automate with our finances, the more optimized the whole process will be and the less time it will take out of my day to stay on track. I’m looking forward to finding more ways to optimize our personal finances this year.

I’m an engineer at heart (and at work). Engineers have a tendency to try to optimize the things they touch—at a base level, this is simply a drive to make things work better. My wife and I have long joked about how I try to optimize everything and try to create systems in my life to both simplify things and make things more efficient. But jokes aside, I think that, when pursued intentionally and driven by core values, optimization is a worthwhile undertaking.

In subsequent posts, I’m going to attempt to document the various things I’m currently working to optimize in my life, including personal finance, digital interaction, daily routines, pool care, beer brewing, and more. This post serves more as an introduction to the overall topic of optimization.

Why Optimize?

The first question that optimization begs is, of course, why bother optimizing in the first place? Aren’t things going pretty well as they are? I would argue that they are not. As humans, we have an unfortunate tendency to fall into patterns without very much forethought. Whatever patterns we are already following in our lives, there is a very high chance that they are not operating very efficiently at all. Humans seem to collect habits, both good and bad, as a kind of default behavior, rather than as a carefully designed approach to life: this presents a very ripe opportunity for optimization.

What to Optimize?

If we are to approach the challenge of optimizing our lives, we first need to determine what to optimize. Not everything is a good candidate for optimization, but I think most, if not all, areas of one’s life are worth examining to see how efficient they are.

I want to take a moment to talk about efficiency. A lot of times, efficiency is used to mean purely an increase in productivity and profits—doing more in less time. But in this more holistic context from which I’m approaching general optimization, I mean efficiency in the sense that my time spent throughout the day is directed towards things that I value, rather than frivolous pursuits that are not aligned with my values. So, when deciding what to optimize, it’s helpful to start with a list of values around which to base your life.

Once you have a list of values, I think the best things to start optimizing are the obvious candidates in your day-to-day life that are completely misaligned with your values: if you value reading books, but you spend your free time playing video games instead of reading, that’s a misalignment that needs to be addressed.

After the obvious candidates, the rest of your day (and even your night) can be examined to see what tweaks can be made to bring all areas of your life more in line with your values.

When to Optimize?

The agile methodology has a lot of traction in the software industry because of its iterative approach to software development. Boiled down, the idea is to continually review and reassess throughout the process to ensure alignment with goals and to course-correct before going too far down the wrong path.

In a similar vein, my approach to life optimizations is not a one-and-done deal, where I jump head-first into the Most Optimal Approach, but rather an iterative process where small improvements can be made continually over time, gradually bringing my life more in line with my values, one area and one tweak at a time.

Additionally, a good time to look for inefficiencies is when adding or changing something in your life—by taking a proactive approach when entering a new season in life, you can avoid some (not all) of the human tendency for poor habit formation and get yourself on the road to more efficient, value-aligned behaviors from the get-go.

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden