The Irony of Efficiency

Hi nerds! I haven't been putting out more blog content for the past couple of months now. I figured I might share something about my self-improvement journey.

Over the past couple of years, I have tried to:

• Sleeping better
• Personal OKR
• Meditate,
• Scheduling: tried strict schedules, and flexible schedules.
• Constant learning: dedicate a few hours every week to reading out better practices, opinions about existing code strategies, data modeling, designs, and anything that I frequently encounter in work/life.

After doing this for a couple of years, I still feel like I'm not getting enough done by each day. That feeling never goes away. In other words, I feel like all the personal improvement that I've tried to do doesn't actually solve the problem.

Looking back, I'm probably 10x more than I was 3 years ago, and my effort in self-improving myself is working great. But from the book *Four Thousand Weeks* by Oliver Burkeman, I learned that the more efficient you become, the more things will be thrown at you. The tasks that you need to do increases the more efficient you become. This is what Oliver called the efficiency trap.

So what's the solution? Should I stop improving myself and let myself just be... slow? Oliver's solution was along the lines of accepting that we humans are limited, we will die, we have things we want to do and we have to accept that we will never get everything done.

Burkeman's message is that we should embrace the present moment and focus on what truly matters, rather than trying to cram more into our limited time on earth. By doing so, we can find greater joy and fulfillment in our lives, even as we acknowledge the irony of our mortality.

I think it's the bitter truth about human life, we'll never get everything done. We are mortals after all. Unless Dr. Sinclair pulls off the reverse aging for the general population 🤷‍♂️