Maybe We Should Stop Trying to Optimise Everything

There is a particular sort of modern tiredness that comes from treating every part of life as a system waiting to be improved.

We optimise our inboxes, sleep scores, food deliveries, commutes, spending, exercise, calendars and supposedly even our leisure. A quiet Sunday can now arrive with the faint air of an underperforming quarterly report. Did we rest efficiently enough? Did we see the right people? Was the walk sufficiently restorative per minute?

I understand the appeal. I am an engineer. I like a process that works, a measurement that reveals something useful, and a dashboard that tells me a sensor has stopped reporting before somebody discovers it at the worst possible moment. Optimisation has its place. A temperature-monitoring system should not be casually philosophical about whether the fridge is warm. It should notice, alarm and preserve evidence.

But people are not cold-chain assets. Most of us do not become more reliable when fitted with another KPI.

Efficiency has a cost

Every optimisation chooses a definition of success. That is unavoidable. The trouble begins when we forget what we have excluded.

In engineering, reducing one metric can make another worse. A system can be made cheaper by removing redundancy, right up until one failed power supply turns a minor fault into an incident. It can be made more responsive by filtering less data, then become noisier and harder to trust. You do not escape trade-offs by refusing to name them. You merely discover them later, usually while holding a metaphorical bucket.

Life works rather similarly, though with fewer wiring diagrams and more unanswered WhatsApps.

Optimising a diary for maximum productivity can remove the unplanned conversation with a friend who is having a bad week. Optimising a household budget down to the final pound can leave no room for generosity, a small treat, or the rather important fact that something will eventually break. Optimising family time into a perfectly scheduled activity can make everyone feel as though they have been invited to a corporate away day with better snacks.

The empty space is not necessarily waste. It is often where life has room to happen.

The body is not a machine with a service interval

Living with disability makes the language of optimisation particularly grating at times. There are days when careful planning conserves energy and makes the difference between joining in and missing out. That is useful. There are also days when the body simply declines to honour the plan, because bodies are marvellously complex and occasionally run their own strike action.

The fashionable answer is often more tracking, more routines, more self-discipline, more hacks. Some of these can help some people. But the idea that every limitation can be outsmarted through sufficiently determined personal administration is both exhausting and unkind.

It also misunderstands access. A step-free entrance, a seat in the right place, flexible working or enough time to recover are not indulgences for people who have failed to optimise themselves. They are sensible design choices that acknowledge human variation. The world becomes easier to use when it stops demanding that everyone operate at the same pace and in the same manner.

If you are already working hard to manage health, pain, fatigue, caring responsibilities or simply a difficult patch, you do not need somebody selling you a colour-coded spreadsheet as moral salvation. You may need rest. You may need help. You may need to leave something undone, where it can sit quietly and learn humility.

Technology keeps offering to help, with conditions

Technology is very good at turning a useful observation into a compulsory target.

A smartwatch can help someone notice patterns in sleep or activity. Fine. Yet within minutes, a gentle prompt becomes a tiny digital deputy headteacher asking why you have not stood up. It does not know you have been ill, travelling, caring for someone, or deep in a piece of work that requires sitting down. It knows only that a number has failed to move in the preferred direction.

This is a design problem, not merely a user problem. Systems should be able to support judgement rather than replacing it with a streak counter. Good tools provide information, context and control. Bad ones keep demanding engagement because engagement is conveniently measurable.

The same applies to AI. It may remove tedious admin, summarise documents, or help make a first draft less intimidating. Those are worthwhile uses. But if its only purpose is to produce more output from every available human minute, we have not made life better. We have simply built a faster conveyor belt and asked why everybody looks pale.

Choose what is worth protecting

The alternative to optimisation is not chaos, nor a noble refusal to use a calendar. It is choosing deliberately where efficiency serves us and where it begins to hollow things out.

Optimise the repetitive task that steals your evening. Optimise the form that nobody should have to fill in twice. Optimise the energy use of the building, the reliability of the service, and the route that saves you standing in the rain for twenty minutes.

Then leave some things gloriously, usefully unoptimised. Cook slowly when you can. Call someone without a reason. Take the longer route if it is pleasant. Keep a little spare capacity in the budget, the diary and the emotional plumbing. Allow a conversation to wander. Allow yourself to be average at a hobby.

A good life is not one in which every minute is accounted for. It is one with enough resilience, connection and breathing room to cope when the plan fails. And it will fail, because life is not an app update. It is rather more interesting, considerably less stable, and thankfully not governed by a release schedule.