Ever thought about replacing all your shoelaces with elastic ones? How about buying 11 pairs of glasses to scatter around your house, so you never need to search for them? Or doing five push-ups every time you get up from your desk to squeeze in some exercise?
Welcome to the world of micro-efficiencies, where every single waking moment can be optimised in order to prise precious time from the jaws of wasted time and defeat.
The Guardian, which mooted some of these suggestions in a recent feature on the phenomenon, points out that these newly freed milliseconds add up. Take, for example, boiling two cups of tea – one for right now, and one for later. Assuming that boiling the kettle takes five minutes, you could conceivably gain 10 full days over the course of two years. That’s two working weeks clawed back from a humble kettle!
If I sound a little sarcastic, it’s because of the sting of self-recognition. I, too, was once the kind of person who laid my clothes out the night before and brushed my teeth in the shower. At the time, I described these as life hacks. But calling them micro-efficiencies has a different ring to it – instead of making life easier, they are about optimising your time so you are more productive.
The distinction sounds slight, but it is a crucial one. A life hack posits that being alive is stressful and difficult at the worst of times, and therefore you should hack the system to make your days run a little smoother. Micro-efficiencies spring from a completely different attitude: that every moment is ripe for doing even more, and that you have somehow failed as a human being by not juicing as much opportunity as possible from the moment your eyes spring open till the second they close at night.
Didn’t listen to an intellectual podcast on your way into work? You dummy – you just wasted a 45-minute commute. Want to natter to a colleague on your break instead of going outside and getting in some of your 10,000 steps, all the better to get some vitamin D? Well done, you’ve just made yourself unfit and vitamin deficient. Didn’t fire off a few emails while queueing up for a coffee? You’re never getting that promotion. When does it end?
Obviously, there are some good reasons to adopt micro-efficiencies. Some medical conditions may necessitate a simpler routine: buying pre-chopped veg, for instance, can save time and effort for those with reduced mobility. I have ADHD myself, and sometimes it feels like clinging onto tiny positive habits is all I can do to hold off the storm of mental distraction – at least that’s what I tell myself when people ask why I’ve got three sets of house keys. (The real answer, by the way, is that one set is almost certainly adrift in a random tote bag somewhere at any one time.)
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The problem comes when these supposedly small habits take over your life, and failing to abide by them makes you feel inadequate. Something that was meant to streamline drudgery suddenly becomes the arbiter of your existence or an expensive new addiction.
How many of us have bought plastic trinkets off an Instagram ad promising that this gadget would revolutionise the way we organise our kitchen, wardrobe or office? How many gratitude or productivity diaries gather dust in a pile of guiltily abandoned self-help books?
Self-optimisation is a modern-day obsession, with an entire cottage industry of aspirational TikTok influencers and entrepreneurs hawking digital planners and productivity worksheets. The irony is that the more you watch their content, the less time you actually have to get on with the stuff you were actually meant to do.
My own life hack phase didn’t last long. It turns out that taking your toothbrush with you in the shower means you’re too distracted to give your teeth a proper clean, and I have the decay to show for it. Paradoxically, I found myself staying up late to plan my outfit for the next day, thus defeating the point of getting more time in bed in the morning.
I started to feel resentful. Instead of simplifying my to-do list, it felt like I was overcomplicating it with more tasks. It’s high time to bin pointlessly chasing productivity. Instead, we should ask ourselves exactly why we feel so overwhelmed.
Forget trying to squeeze more in and doing everything at once. Maybe we would be better off doing less and taking our time with the things we choose to do. We may think that segmenting life into performance-boosting side quests will help to quiet the chaos around us – but in many cases, it simply adds to the din.
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