Although I spend a lot of time doing it, I’ve spent little time talking explicitly about my focus on optimization. The pursuit of optimization is more or less, the lens through which I see most issues and facets of my life. Whether it’s health, wealth, love and relationships or internal peace and enlightenment, optimization is the name of the game I’m constantly playing in my head. In this piece, rather than focus on some specific issue, I want to talk a bit about my process for tackling various issues.
One common misconception of optimization is that it leaves students of the approach robotic and inflexible. On some level it’s understandable how this picture comes about, given that much of optimization is about being a well-oiled machine. What I’ve found, is that in simple terms, we are looking to find favorable positions and flow charts that we can use to make low creativity actions automatic so we can focus resources on the most demanding aspects of a given task. One example that’s relevant to something I’ve been working on recently, is networking through email. There are a number of aspects of the email that should always be present regardless of what form they take. These are examples of where “rules of thumb” come into play. The entire purpose of a rule of thumb, from what I can tell, is that it removes the headache around super common situations and streamlines them by reducing the number of options. Keeping with the email example, things like shows of gratitude, respect for the other’s time, and a bias towards listening and treating everyone like they are important, because they are, are all things present in any great email. Once we fill in those areas with whatever language seems appropriate, and yes of course you need to be genuine, the creativity comes with pitching a question, sending your unique, kind note, or knowing when and how to be playful. One doesn’t have to be a neuroscientist to know that high- level focus and creativity requires a fuckton (the technical term) of energy. Taking that as basically true, the logic I find success with, is streamline everything so that I can focus as much peak performance as possible on the biggest ROI items.
Now of course the next question is “, how do we actually streamline?” The two things that I try to focus on are efficiency and effectiveness. These are two concepts that I’ve learned to think about differently over the years by studying many high-productivity people such as Peter Drucker, Tim Ferriss, Peter Diamandis and many others. As someone with a bit of a workaholic, hustler streak, I have a bad habit of trying to solve my insecurity with increasing work volume and efficiency. While this is perhaps not the worst problem to have, it has a number of downsides. Most importantly, working more hours, or working weekends are socially reinforced, and also happen to not automatically encourage us to focus on being effective. As Drucker talks about in some of his work, doing the wrong things well, does not make them important, and doing the right things slowly will still confer superior results to energy wasted efficiently. The takeaway for me at first was to try to do both, which isn’t necessarily the wrong conclusion, but this logic too has its errors. I find that being effective by selecting the most important, often initially discomforting things, is akin to sprinting while being efficient is more like jogging. While you may be able to jog or walk for many hours, sprinting for 8+ hours a day, is a fantastic way to end up burnt out or in a hospital. I’ve certainly talked about the revelation a decent amount elsewhere, so I’ll try to not to belabor it, but sprinting, to get the greatest benefit should be done in shorter, well-defined bursts, and not for indefinite periods. The second short point to make, as I’ve talked about how to identify what’s important before, is create blank space on the calendar, clear off the desk and computer tabs and give yourself space for total immersion, deep work.
The last thing that I want to go over here, is the utility and application of flow charts and problem solving logic. As I mentioned before, putting ourselves in advantageous positions is crucial, because instead of reacting with a random option off the stack, we have a sense of the few best options and can proactively respond with the optimal one for a particular scenario. To illustrate how this might work lemme quickly create a flow chart formula that covers common scenarios.
Step 1
ask: “How much benefit is there for completing this task?” if the benefit is reasonably high ask question 2, if the benefit is low consider parsing another activity
ask:”How frequently do I perform this activity?” if semi-often or greater this is a high priority to optimize because you will feel the benefit right away, if lower depending on the benefit per completion move on, or analyze a different task
Step 2
Deconstruct the task. Break it up into bite-sized pieces and then order from simplest to most complex or demanding. This allows us to figure out what parts to automate or practice to the point of 2nd nature competence.
Step 3
ask: “What might this look like if I wanted this done in 1/2 the time, 1/4 the time and so on?” This helps us naturally sequence the activity such that it’s performed efficiently, and allows us to make the optimal approach more automatic. It also allows us to remove steps that may be wholly unnecessary.
Step 4
For small things keep a mental flow chart, and for big things keep a written or recorded flow chart. If something is important and we interact with it frequently we want to remove as much guesswork as possible when speed is of the essence.
As a final note, I find the biggest common mistakes are avoiding optimizing hard things or tasks we view as high creativity, failing to optimize tasks that are time-consuming, but low return such as chores, and not stopping to review optimization success at regular intervals. If we last optimized something 6 months ago, it may be working quite well, but spending even just 5 to 10 minutes looking it over, may reveal room for improvement that makes a meaningful difference without a jump in execution difficulty.
As always I could say more on this topic but this provides a pretty good idea of how I think about optimization. I’m curious to hear from you guys what’s something that you want to optimize that’s high ROI? Leave your answer in the comments below. I hope this was useful in some way and I hope you will be well.
May the productivity be with you,
Orion Aeneas Webster,
FourthEye author
FourthEye 
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