Why Optimising Your Life Might Be Making It Worse

The Productivity Trap Nobody Warns You About

At some point in the last decade, self-improvement stopped being a personal journey and became a competitive sport. The rules are clear: wake up earlier, move more, eat cleaner, meditate longer, read wider, optimise harder. Life optimisation became the unofficial religion of the ambitious — and most of us converted without even noticing.

But here's the uncomfortable truth that the advice economy rarely surfaces: for many people, the relentless pursuit of an optimised life isn't making them more productive or more fulfilled. It's making them quietly miserable.

Filmmaker and creator Matt D'Avella recently explored this tension head-on, and what he articulated resonates far beyond his own experience as a sleep-deprived father of two. The problem isn't that you're implementing the wrong systems. The problem is that you're trying to pour an ocean into a thimble — and blaming yourself when it spills.

This is a deeper look at why life optimisation often backfires, what the science and philosophy actually say about time and choice, and what it genuinely means to build a life worth living when you can't do it all.

The Advice Economy Has Created an Impossible Standard

Imagine a single day built entirely from the advice currently circulating on podcasts, YouTube channels, and wellness newsletters. You'd need to strength train four times a week, hit 150 minutes of zone two cardio, sleep a full eight hours (plus wind-down time), meditate for thirty minutes, prep protein-dense meals, get morning sunlight, do mobility work, read books, maintain friendships, manage finances, stay informed, and — if the more enthusiastic biohackers are to be believed — sort out your peptide protocol.

That's not a day. That's a second job with worse pay and no annual leave.

The advice itself isn't wrong, exactly. Strength training is good. Sleep matters. Protein is important. The problem is aggregation. Each individual recommendation arrives stripped of context, as though your life is a blank calendar waiting to be filled rather than an already-crowded schedule with competing demands. When you stack enough individually reasonable suggestions on top of each other, the result is collectively absurd.

Researchers who study decision fatigue have long noted that the sheer volume of choices and commitments we face daily depletes our cognitive and emotional resources. When your to-do list becomes an indictment of everything you haven't done, the natural psychological response isn't motivation — it's paralysis, resentment, or burnout.

Oliver Burkeman's Uncomfortable Maths

The philosopher and author Oliver Burkeman offers one of the most clarifying — and sobering — frameworks for understanding our relationship with time. In 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Burkeman points out that a human life of roughly eighty years amounts to just four thousand weeks. Most adults reading this have already spent somewhere between thirty and forty percent of that total.

The book's central argument is radical in its simplicity: the real problem isn't that you're managing your time badly. It's that you're operating under the delusion that better systems will eventually allow you to do everything. They won't. Time is finite. Finitude is the condition, not the obstacle.

Burkeman writes that the more you believe you might succeed in fitting everything in, the more commitments you naturally accumulate — and the less carefully you evaluate whether each new one is worth a portion of your irreplaceable time. The result is a life packed with activities you don't especially value, pursued in the frantic hope that completing them will finally clear space for the things that actually matter.

This is the trap. Optimisation, in this context, doesn't solve the scarcity problem. It disguises it — right up until the moment it doesn't.

Why Saying No to Good Things Is the Hardest Skill

Most productivity advice focuses on eliminating the obvious time-wasters: doom-scrolling, unnecessary meetings, mindless television. And yes, cutting those things helps. But that's the easy edit. The harder, more meaningful work is what habit researcher and Atomic Habits author James Clear describes as recognising that genuinely good habits from one season of life can become a poor fit in another.

Clear, speaking about his own experience becoming a parent, noted that it took him well over a year to accept giving up habits that had previously served him well. Not bad habits — good ones. Exercise routines. Creative projects. Practices that had been genuinely beneficial. The difficulty wasn't identifying what was bad. It was grieving what was good but no longer sustainable.

This is the emotional core of the life optimisation problem that nobody puts on a motivational graphic. Saying no to Netflix is easy. Saying no to your morning meditation, your evening run, your weekend writing project, or your social life — things that genuinely nourish you — is a different kind of loss entirely. And pretending otherwise doesn't make you disciplined. It makes you dishonest with yourself.

Accepting hard trade-offs without resentment may be one of the most underrated emotional skills an adult can develop. It requires acknowledging that choosing one thing always means not choosing something else — and that this isn't a failure of planning. It's just the arithmetic of a finite life.

What 'Un-Optimising' Actually Looks Like

There's a growing countermovement to peak optimisation culture, and it's worth taking seriously. Not because doing less is inherently virtuous, but because the obsession with 1% gains across every domain of life tends to produce diminishing — and eventually negative — returns on wellbeing.

The concept of satisficing, introduced by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, offers a useful alternative lens. Rather than optimising — finding the absolute best option — satisficing means choosing the option that is good enough given your actual constraints. It's not settling. It's being honest about what your life can actually hold.

In practice, this might look like lifting weights twice a week instead of five times. It might mean ten minutes of meditation when you can get it rather than a rigorous daily practice. It might mean watching reality television with your partner on a Friday evening instead of finishing a book. None of this is optimal by the metrics of peak performance culture. All of it might be exactly right for the life you're actually living.

Crucially, research on subjective wellbeing consistently shows that satisfaction comes less from the absolute quantity of good experiences and more from the quality and meaning we attach to them. Scarcity, counterintuitively, can increase the value of what remains. When you stop treating every hour as a unit of productivity to be maximised, the hours you do spend on things you love tend to feel richer.

The Life You Chose Is the Work

One of the most psychologically freeing shifts anyone can make is moving from the feeling of being forced into trade-offs to recognising that your trade-offs are the result of choices you made — choices that reflect your values.

If you have children, you chose that. If you have a demanding career, you chose that. If you moved to an expensive city, or took on a long commute, or committed to a relationship that requires significant emotional investment — those were choices, each of which carries real costs and real rewards. Treating the costs as injustices imposed on you from outside is both factually inaccurate and emotionally corrosive.

This isn't about toxic positivity or pretending constraints don't exist. It's about intellectual honesty. When D'Avella describes finally accepting that the frustrations of early parenthood were inseparable from the profound meaning it gave his life, he isn't dismissing the difficulty. He's locating it correctly — as the price of something chosen and valued, not as evidence that his life management has failed.

That reframe changes everything. The question stops being 'how do I fit it all in?' and becomes 'given what I've said yes to, what am I at peace saying no to?' That's a harder question. But it's a real one, with real answers.

A Practical Framework for When There Isn't Enough Time

If you've recognised yourself in any of this — overwhelmed by good advice, frustrated by your inability to implement it all, quietly resentful of your own schedule — here's a more honest framework than another colour-coded calendar.

First, audit your actual time. Not the time you think you have, but the time that remains after sleep, work, essential relationships, and basic domestic life. Be brutal. Most people discover they have significantly less discretionary time than they assumed — and the surprise alone is clarifying.

Second, identify your non-negotiables. Not your aspirational non-negotiables — the things you tell yourself you'll prioritise — but the things that, when missing for a week, genuinely affect your mood, energy, and sense of self. For some people that's exercise. For others it's creative work or solitude. These go first. Everything else is optional.

Third, stop treating the rest of the list as a to-do. The podcast recommendations, the biohacking protocols, the side hustle advice — consume it as information, not obligation. Most of it is not intended for your specific life in its current configuration. That doesn't mean it has no value. It means you get to decide what, if anything, applies to you right now.

Fourth, revisit seasonally. James Clear's insight about habits and life seasons is practically useful. Constraints change. Children grow up. Careers shift. What's impossible now may be entirely achievable in three years. The point isn't to give up permanently — it's to be honest about what this particular season can hold.

Finally, let go of the resentment. This one is harder and slower than the others, but it may matter most. A life well-lived isn't one where everything gets done. It's one where the most important things get your actual presence and attention — not the distracted, optimisation-anxious version of you, but the version that has made peace with what it means to be a person with one life and not enough time.

Conclusion: Less Optimisation, More Intention

The goal was never to do everything. The goal was always to do what matters. But somewhere in the noise of the advice economy, those two things got confused — and a lot of people have spent years exhausting themselves chasing a standard that was never achievable and often not even desirable.

Life optimisation, at its worst, is a sophisticated form of avoidance. If you're always refining your system, you never have to confront the harder question of whether you're spending your finite weeks on the right things in the first place.

The better question — the one worth sitting with — is simple, if not easy: what are you willing to say no to? Answer that honestly, and you don't need a better productivity system. You need the courage to follow through.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it really possible to have too many good habits?

Yes — when viewed in aggregate, even individually beneficial habits can create an unsustainable load. The issue isn't the habits themselves but the unrealistic expectation that all of them can coexist in a single life with genuine constraints. Prioritising a few key habits that fit your current season tends to produce better results than attempting a full optimisation stack and burning out.

What is 'satisficing' and how does it differ from settling?

Satisficing, a term coined by economist Herbert Simon, means choosing an option that meets your needs adequately rather than exhaustively seeking the theoretical optimum. It differs from settling in that it's a deliberate, rational response to real constraints — not resignation or lack of ambition. In time-scarce conditions, satisficing often leads to better overall wellbeing than relentless optimisation.

How do I figure out what my actual non-negotiables are?

A useful test: identify the activities or practices whose absence, after one to two weeks, noticeably affects your mood, energy, relationships, or sense of self. These are your true non-negotiables — not the things you think should matter based on advice you've consumed, but the things that empirically make a measurable difference to how you function. Build your schedule around those first.

Why does the 'advice economy' make time management feel harder?

Because each piece of advice is produced and consumed in isolation, without accounting for the cumulative demand it places on your time and attention. Individually, most recommendations are reasonable. Collectively, they describe a lifestyle that would require a forty-eight-hour day and no existing commitments. Recognising this dynamic helps you consume advice as optional information rather than obligatory instruction.

What's the first step if I feel overwhelmed by everything I'm supposed to be doing?

Start with a realistic audit of your actual discretionary time — the hours that remain after sleep, work, and essential relationships. Most people are genuinely surprised by how little that is, and the clarity that comes from seeing it accurately is often more useful than any new system. From there, choose two or three things that genuinely matter and give yourself permission to deprioritise the rest, at least for now.