There’s a particular kind of trap that only catches people who are paying attention. I fell into it somewhere around my third productivity system in two years — not because I was lazy, but because I was optimising.
The morning routine started reasonably: wake time, water, a few minutes of stillness before the phone. It worked. So naturally I refined it. Added a journaling block. Timed the journaling block. Researched better journaling frameworks. Built a template. Iterated the template. At some point I was spending more cognitive energy managing the system than the system was ever saving me.
This is the meta-game nobody warns you about. Every efficiency you create becomes a new object that requires maintenance, defence, and periodic review. The optimiser needs optimising. And the optimiser of the optimiser — well, you can see where this goes. The overhead compounds faster than the savings.
What I’ve learned is that a small, stable inefficiency is often worth keeping. Not everything that could be better, should be. The question isn’t can I improve this? but what is the total cost of improving it, sustained over time? That includes the attention you’ll spend monitoring whether the improvement is working, the friction of updating it when life shifts, and the quiet anxiety of knowing the system exists and might be slipping.
I still have a morning routine. It’s four things. I haven’t touched it in months. The stillness I was optimising for turned out to be the stillness of leaving it alone.