A micro-efficiency is when you do something that, in a small way, makes you more efficient. Stacking is when you combine them to maximise the efficiency.
A long time ago, I started making myself two coffees at the same time in the morning. The first one had a good splash of cold water in it, so I could get my fix asap. The second was boiling hot. By the time my first one has been consumed with my morning doom scroll through the news, the second one was at the perfect temperature.
I saved the trip back downstairs to make the second cup. I stacked that efficiency by installing a boiling water tap. Now I no longer need to wait for the kettle to boil. Over the course of the day, and at least six coffees, assuming a three-minute boiling time, I save 18 minutes. A chai in the afternoon and a hot chocolate before bed, and I am up 24 minutes in my day.
Project Manager at Motley Fool, uses a treadmill desk on May, 20, 2015 in Alexandria, VA..(Photo by Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images).
My latest one is a walking pad at my desk. I needed to lose weight. I find walking beneficial for my mental health. I do not have the time in the day to spend an hour and a half outside getting my 10,000 steps, or whatever number the boffins have come up with this time. So, I put a small folding treadmill under my standing desk (yes, I’m one of those), and when I need to write or get through an inbox I don’t want to deal with, I put my headphones on, crank the thing up to 3.5 miles an hour and walk until the job is done.
The side benefit I’m stacking turns out to be core strength. It’s harder than you might think to work a mouse accurately at that speed, which has resulted in quite the abs workout.
Most mornings, I also do three turns around the field in front of my house. The dog gets a herding ball, and within 15 minutes, he is gubbed. I have had fresh air, and I’ve planned my day. Micro-efficiencies, stacked, apparently.
I’ve also been experimenting with the Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs approach to life. If you pay attention, they wore/wear almost the same thing every day. It’s deliberate – it reduces the number of decisions they make in a day, helping deal with a new phenomenon coined decision fatigue. I spotted it in food. At a point when my mood was at a particularly low ebb, I could not find the energy to decide what to eat, to cook, to tidy up, and to wash up. It all felt far too much, and resulted in me eating badly, at the wrong times. In turn, that did its own stacking and made my mood worse.
In an effort to arrest the decline, I signed up for a protein shake subscription, and a ready meal service targeted at the elderly. It’s been a revelation. I won’t live on shakes and ready meals forever, but the headspace gained from not having to think about what to buy and eat, and the battle of wills in the Co-op between the angel on one shoulder looking at salad, and the devil on the other stroking a family size pizza, has been eliminated.
I let myself do what I fancy on a Friday and Saturday, or when invited out, but otherwise I use my new system. In one fell swoop, I have saved time and brainspace – very little washing up or trips to the Co-op, no time spent cooking, and far fewer daily decisions.
I have also lost weight because the side effect of my current regime is built-in calorie control. I have probably saved on fuel. My micro-efficiencies are suitably stacked.
If you are coming to the conclusion that this life hacking is interesting but borderline unhealthy, you would be right. I’m watching myself with interest.
As I often like to say, there is nothing new under the sun. It might be a new word, but it’s been a thing since people were people.
A common joke in Tiree is that you only travel the four miles to Scarinish on a day the bank is open so that you can combine the shop, the bank and the post office in one trip. Because four miles is a long way.
We put the dishwasher on as we go up to bed so we wake to clean cups. We undersow crops to get two harvests from one field. We clean the shower while we are in it. Or is that just me?
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THE problem for people of my generation is that every moment we save gets eaten up by something else. Side hustles, gym time, the five litres of water we’re supposed to imbibe and the sunscreen we are supposed to slather everywhere on a daily basis.
Get through your tasks more quickly than expected? Great, here’s a new helping of things to do. Faster, more efficiently. Done? Great, fill the saved time profitably.
No wonder burnout is on the up, and a new mental health nightmare is on the way. It involves AI, because of course it does.
Like many people, I use AI like a multi-skilled assistant. It reviews reports, it checks code, it pulls website stats, crunches them, and spits out the results. It implements the ideas I have that I do not have knowledge or skills to execute.
Leaving the ethics of that, which I am still working through in my own mind, to one side, it is resulting in an interesting pattern. While my assistant chews through a task, I switch to another one. It’s efficient. But then the first task pings. I switch focus. I go back to the second task, but now I have an idea and spin up another window.
Window two pings; I switch; window one pings. I try to remember where I was. Part of this is how my brain works – which AI is encouraging in a very unhealthy way – and part of it is how the world around us is being shaped.
Fast news, soundbites, feeds that go from one topic to another in split seconds as we scroll. My phone has been on silent for years. Most of my group chats are muted. And yet, the phone remains filled with notifications.
I started to pay more attention to my own behaviour. I realised that when I scrolled myself to sleep, I woke up with a racing mind. When I read a paper book before bed, I wake up with a much quieter mind. I’m trying to do that every night. Or a word puzzle. Anything except what the phone addiction demands, which is constant attention.
Apparently, in this world of dreadful buzz-phrases, this is called sleep hygiene.
I suspect the trick is to embrace the efficiencies the new world offers in order to use the saved time to have a life; a life that lets the brain rest, the body move, and the burnout fizzle out. When I unlock that level in the game of life, I’ll let you know.
My current life-hacking experiment, with its micro-efficiencies and stacking, is unlikely to last – these phases rarely do – but it’s working for now. The words are written. My five miles are complete, and my breakfast shake awaits.
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