Optimisation had been a big thing on my mind until not very long ago. It took Sam Altman talking about how ChatGPT will optimise parents’ relationship with their children to make me conscious of the silliness I was gravitating towards.
These silicon valley bros - who represent something I’d like to stay away from - were the paragons of optimisation. That itself was enough to make me want to distance myself.
That’s how it started. A decision to live linearly. Not have too many parallel threads. The difficult part here is not to avoid that parallel processing. Rather, it’s realising when you are parallel processing.
One of the less obvious ways to do this is when using my phone. A slow page load. An app going through an update. Claude generating an answer in the background. A large file getting downloaded. All of these are ‘waste of time’ if you wait around for the task to finish. I never calculated or thought of it, but I assume most of these things would finish under 2 minutes.
That said, if you look at these as ‘waste of time’, you’d want to quickly do something ‘useful’ in the meantime. Check email. Open up reddit/linkedin/instagram/techcrunch/facebook…
A quick check of the notifications and I’ll come back to a loaded page or an updated app or the downloaded file. Unfortunately, the attention vampires that these useful little quick checks are, you often don’t come back to your page/file/app.
The work stalls. The scroll continues.
I have no numbers. I only have feelings. Here, I’ll rank them just as important because when you browse Youtube shorts and ‘feel better’, someone is incentivised to make you feel so. When you wait for a boring task to finish and you feel better, the feeling is more likely to be real because there’s no one with conflicting incentives working to make you feel so.
Anyway. The bottomline is, wait for that page to load, wait for that app to update. Let your attention tarry. Sometimes, inefficient is faster.
P.S. I also wanted to write about that YC startup who introduced tiktok/insta feeds right in the coding agent. While you’re waiting for your output, no need to go outside the app to scroll. Stay right by your agent so when it comes back, you don’t waste any time picking your chain of thought back up. Like I said, valley bros.