A fundamental component of my personality is finding ways of becoming more efficient in all aspects of life. The reasoning for this is to free my mind of trivial, repeated decisions and to gain focus on things that truly matter. Today I’ll talk about some starting points to begin thinking this way.
Be proactive in thoughts and processes
A good goal to strive towards is constant vigilance in day-to-day actions. Just because I do something a certain way doesn’t mean that is the best way. I’ve found that little questions throughout the day help reduce unneccesary repetition. Habits can be the worst culprit since they’re generally done on autopilot. The idea is to make sure that the habits I have are useful and to try to find better ones; as more unneeded effort is refocused life becomes easier and easier. In a perfect world, the only decisions that need to be made are meaningful and influential.
Do or defer, never delay
Once a problem or opportunity becomes apparent, the first response should be to do the thing or to plan a way to come back to it and forget about it. This builds off of the previous point; when I see something actionable I ask myself if I can mentally categorize it in some habit or process I already know well. If not, I expend the effort to fully understand the task or set aside time to give it my all later. I resist the urge to postpone complex objectives; intentional effort now allows for far less effort later.
Consolidate and abstract
Sometimes the most useful decision is to cut out entire aspects of life in favor of more beneficial efforts. For example, if I notice persistent fatigue, sour thoughts, and lack of direction two paths arise. Either each of these problems could have arisen from individual causes or each could be solved by some simpler, yet most likely disruptive habit - such as exercise. Plenty of speed bumps in life are the results of poor planning or misunderstanding and it is important to make the conscious decision to seek out how to avoid these issues from building up.
Now, none of what I just said was comprehensive, but this reflects my thoughts on living efficiently. Sometimes the most annoying problems in life can be solved with a little bit of forethought and as I make this a habit I find that life doesn’t have to be about catching up to yesterday.