If you’re a professional at any craft, chances are that you have already made some kind of optimization to better suit your particular workflow, to make things more effective for yourself.
The estimated amount of time dedicated to an activity often dictates the amount of effort we’ll invest on optimizing our setup and workflow for accomplishing that activity. In other words, we weight wheter it is worth facing the uncomfortable in order to have some benefit from it.
We have this innate skill to convert somewhat uncomfortable practices and patterns into second-nature when we recognize the benefits are worthwhile. This process occurs at every different zoom level, from changing the place where we place our keys at home to migrating to an automatic car.
And yet, even with this behavior hardwired into our brains, we often miss the oportunities for useful optimizations because some things that are harder to change. We frequently become too comfortable with “one size fits all” patterns, particularly because these patterns are usually easier at first, so the bare thought of changing them yields a higher perception of discomfort.
We reach for comfort. Everywhere. And It makes sense, comfort is good, and it makes us feel good. But we often forget that discomfort is usually temporary. And if we want optimal we have to deal with discomfort until it feels comfortable again.
This perception of discomfort narrows our focus, preventing us from even considering the benefits of potential optimization. We effectively forget about our ability of getting used to something that’s uncomfortable at first. We trade potential optimizations for the comfort of mantaining familiar patterns.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with making that trade, optimizing everything would indeed be madness. However if we consciously evaluate our trades, chances are we’ll make better choices.
I advocate for some mindful thinking from time to time to address the potential optimizations in any workflow. Each person is different so each person benefits from a particular set of optimizations. For instance, a person who’s always taking notes may benefit from a workflow optimization that would make this process smoother, while a person that doesn’t take many notes wouldn’t gain much from that.
Consider thinking about yourself, your patterns. Try to identify your actual needs, they are often hidden behind the things you do. Which needs are more likely to persist? What are the things that get in your way? What are the things that you tend not to do because there’s too much friction? What can you do about it? Try to pay special attention to the things you do all the time and that you expect to keep doing for a good time, that’s where the better opportunities tend to hide.
Although i encourage the act of minfully contamplating personal optimizations, i understand that diving too deep into this concept may be harmful. It’s not uncommon to see people fall into the pitfall of focusing only on their personalized optimizations, forgetting that this improvements are intended to support the achievement of other goals. That’s one of the reasons why i advocate that this process should be done periodically, not incessantly.