Redefining life optimisation

For most of my twenties, I was chasing the “optimal” morning routine. Sunlight within minutes of waking, at least 500mL of water, some form of movement, a little meditation, a cold shower, and caffeine delayed by however long the latest study recommended.

Every Sunday, the one morning where David and I could slow down a little, I’d sit there with a coffee in hand, anxiously waiting for a number on a clock to give me permission to drink it. How did it turn out like this?

Say “life optimisation” to a hundred people and you’ll get roughly three reactions. I’ve cycled through all three myself.

The first is excitement. They’re reading the books, implementing the tactics, tracking the metrics and planning their morning routines to the minute. Our time is finite, so why wouldn’t you want to make the most of it?

The second is overwhelm. They optimised hard for a while, and now they’re exhausted by the very thing that promised them control. There’s always one more protocol to incorporate, and the sheer volume of things you’re supposed to be doing starts costing more than it gives back. Some part of them wants to stop. But stopping feels like falling behind, or falling apart, so they keep going.

The third is rejection, quiet or loud, of the whole pursuit. All that overwhelm led them to eventually conclude that optimisation is the error. A way of turning a messy, finite life into a spreadsheet, and then mistaking the spreadsheet for the point. Life is meant to be lived, not managed.

That’s the arc I moved through, and it’s the same arc most people who take life optimisation seriously move through eventually.

Each stage is right about something.

The excitement is right that our life resources are finite and the desire to spend them well is logical.

The exhaustion is right that pouring a finite pool of time, mental, physical, and financial resource into an ever-growing list of habits while ignoring opportunity cost can only end in overwhelm.

And the rejection is right that no one, on their deathbed, wishes they’d nailed their caffeine timing or executed their morning routine more precisely. You’ll be thinking about the people you loved, the work that mattered, whether you actually looked after yourself. Optimisation was supposed to serve that life. Not become the goal in and of itself.

There’s a fourth group, the ones who simply don’t care, but if you’re reading this article then chances are you’re not one of them. You’re somewhere on the arc above, genuinely wanting to live well, but still sensing that something is missing.

What all three miss

While all three stages above get something right, all three miss something.

They’re all reacting to the same picture of what life optimisation is supposed to look like, and that picture was wrong from the start.

Picture it with me. Waking up at 5am to a flawless morning routine. A perfectly engineered diet. Deep work blocks with zero distractions and interruptions. An optimised exercise regimen that includes strength, cardio, mobility and anything new you’re supposed to be doing. An evening routine optimised for the science of perfect sleep.

That’s the image most people are carrying when they hear the phrase, and to be fair, the underlying advice usually isn’t bad. Sleep science is sound. Deep work works. The problem isn’t the advice. It’s the assumption underneath it, that life optimisation is one fixed, idealised state that looks the same for everyone, and if you’re not living inside it, you’re falling short.

At some point this stopped being about improving your life and started being about the fear of not doing enough. Some days it feels less like self-improvement and more like a second job you never applied for. There was a phrase I heard once on a podcast, where a listener had apparently said “all this self-help is killing me.” That stuck with me because it was exactly how I felt too.

This version of optimisation quietly ignores something obvious. People live in wildly different realities. What’s reasonable for one person is out of the question for another, and no one tells you that when they’re handing you the routine.

A better definition

Which is why the definition needs to change, not the ambition behind it.

Life optimisation is not an ideal end state, and it does not look like one thing.

Life optimisation is simply making the best opportunity cost decision you can, given the life resources you actually have and the arbitrary life goals you’ve actually chosen.

That’s it.

This definition acknowledges that everyone is working from a different position. Your time, mental resource, physical resource, financial resource, social capital, and misconcepts set will never match anyone else’s, and neither will your goals. Which means everyone is optimising towards a slightly different destination, and the allocation of finite resources towards that destination has to look different too.

The inclusion of opportunity cost also acknowledges that our resources are finite and thus life is a series of trade-offs. Maybe it would be great to do A, B, and C. But your resources are constrained, so realistically you can do one well. Say it’s B. You choose B, at the cost of A and C, even though A and C were both genuinely good. That’s the best opportunity cost decision available to you, given what you actually want and what you actually have. That is what optimal currently looks like to you.

This is what makes the redefinition empowering. You’re no longer being measured against a single idealised vision of life. Your best decision, given what you actually have and what you actually want, is genuinely optimal.

It’s contextual

An optimal life for a single mother raising two kids on minimum wage and a young professional couple with no dependents on a combined income of $267k looks completely different.

A dad running a small farm in rural New Zealand and a dad working a corporate job in central New York are not optimising towards the same thing.

A teenager in Manila scraping together the next meal and a teenager in Germany who’s never once had to wonder where dinner’s coming from are answering a completely different question with their days.

Life optimisation wears many different clothes because it belongs to whoever’s wearing it. It is contextual, full stop.

But even when you judge it only against your own goals and your own resources, life optimisation carries one more twist.

It will always look suboptimal in hindsight

Counterintuitively, optimising well and consistently will still look suboptimal when you look back on it.

Why? Your goals shift and iterate, so the target you’re optimising towards keeps moving. Your resources are never static either. Time depletes while, hopefully, financial resource grows, so the spending decisions that made sense at 25 stop making sense at 35. And your misconcepts set keeps improving, so you start seeing variables you couldn’t see before.

So even while you’re consistently making the best opportunity cost decisions available to you, looking back will always feel a little suboptimal. You now have hindsight, more knowledge, more experience, and goals or resources that have evolved since.

A process, not a destination

Which means life optimisation was never an end state you arrive at and then live inside forever. There’s no idealised version of your life waiting at the finish line where everything finally clicks into place and stays there. Everything is always changing and you’re never going to hold perfect balance.

Think of a tightrope walker. They are never actually balanced, not even when they look perfectly still from the ground. What looks like balance is a continuous stream of small corrections, weight shifting, posture adjusting, a hundred tiny recalibrations a minute. That’s the technique itself rather than a flaw.

Life optimisation works the same way. It’s not an end state you achieve. It’s a practice of continuous error-correction, decision by decision, for as long as you’re making decisions at all.

How to actually do this

Start with your arbitrary life goals, because without them, you don’t have anything to measure your opportunity cost decisions against.

Most of us inherited a picture of a good life from the family, community, or culture we happened to be born into, and never paused to check whether it’s what we actually want. The best way I’ve come across to cut to the heart of what matters to us is to use mortality as the razor.

At 90 years old, looking back, what would you want to tell your 20-year-old self?

On your deathbed, what would you wish you did more of and less of?

At your funeral, what do you actually want people to say about you?

Hold those questions for a moment. Then remember that in a hundred years, almost no one will remember your name at all. That’s freeing, not depressing. It means you’re not living your life for an imaginary audience. You get to conjecture what a good life looks like to you, and build towards that instead of towards what you assumed was expected of you.

Once you have clarity on your goals, they become the measure for everything else. New piece of advice on sleep, productivity, health, whatever it is, run it through these questions. Does this actually serve my goals? And if it does, what’s the opportunity cost, given where I am right now? What would saying yes to this cost me elsewhere, and is that trade worth it?

If the answer is yes, do it.

If it’s no, you can let it go without guilt, no matter how well-intentioned the advice was.

If you’re not sure, run a small experiment. Try it, get real-world feedback on whether it actually worked for you and why, then adjust. That’s the whole iteration loop in miniature: conjecture, test, error-correct.

Take the Sunday morning I mentioned earlier. Does the caffeine delay serve my actual goals? Maybe, marginally. But it came at the cost of being present with David and sharing a ritual we both loved and that marginal gain isn’t worth it for me.

Your optimised life was never going to look optimal on paper

You don’t have to be the person who’s excited about optimisation, or the one who’s exhausted by it, or the one who’s ready to reject it outright. You just have to make the best decision you can, with the resources you actually have, towards a life you actually chose.

Some days that will look like a 5am routine. Some days it will look like sleeping in and calling it recovery. Both can be optimal. It depends entirely on what you’re optimising towards, and only you get to decide that.

These days, Sunday mornings for me just mean coffee with David. Nothing more optimised than that.