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