What You Gain When You Stop Optimizing Your Life

How efficiency-apps and micro-scheduling affect your attention to what’s important?

Me | Photo © John McDermott

“Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.” The famous line from The Godfather movie…

There are various ways to focus our attention on the important things during the day and to outsource the unpleasant things in life.

Do over-optimizing and micro-scheduling affect our attention to what’s important?

New time management, efficiency, or productivity tools are always being developed in form of apps or online services. The question is whether we can change a life situation with too much work, excessive demands, and too tightly scheduled days through apps and precise time planning?

Perhaps this is just putting a band-aid on the wound instead of changing the root of the situation?

It’s great that we can get help from different sides. I don’t like to clean, so it’s wonderful if I could leave that to a cleaning service, which saves time and nerves and the time can be better used for things that are important to me.

Those who have a business and outsource tasks that others are more skilled in have a better chance to focus their attention on strategic questions about how the business can grow and be better managed.

Nature does not optimize — otherwise, it had ceased to develop

At what point, however, are we just left to “function” like machine-controlled humans through meticulous time management planning, fitness monitoring apps, or Christmas tree set up services?

We love that everything is so conveniently streamlined — instead of LIVING and perceiving what’s happening in the world and around us.

A farmer’s wife went to the well every day to fetch water for her garden. Her watering can have a leak, so she always lost some of the water on the way. Stubborn as old people sometimes are, however, she refused to buy a new one, even though her neighbors laughed at her. One day she noticed that on the path from the well to the garden grew a fine, beautiful strip of grass and flowers that had not been there before and now marked her daily…