People overestimate how much control they have over outcomes in their life.
Optimisation assumes you can know, in advance, which hours in your life will matter. But reality is far more random than that.
For example taking a slow train instead of the fastest possible flight looks irrational if your only metric is minutes saved. But why assume saved minutes are worth more than the experience, thought, reading, conversation or calm you get on the train?
We default to the flight because optimising time is seductive as it gives you immediate evidence of progress. A task completed, a check on the to do list and a minute saved give us a small feeling of accomplishment that keeps us coming back for more. Unoptimized time gives you none of that: nothing finished, nothing ticked, no obvious return, so we avoid it.
But the payoffs of unoptimized time (or “wasted time”) are rare and lumpy.
In 1957, Paul McCartney went to a church fête in Liverpool, where he met John Lennon. No productivity system would have picked a local fête as the best use of his afternoon, and most afternoons like it lead nowhere. But this one led to the Beatles.
That is the nature of “wasted time”: hundreds of hours may produce nothing, and then one unproductive-looking hour turns out to contain your life’s work. The cost of an afternoon like that is capped (you lose a few hours). The upside isn’t (it can change your life). You can’t know in advance which hour it will be, and that is why you can’t optimise for it.
Meanwhile, the gains from optimising can feel like progress but they are often small, and come with hidden risks. A back-to-back calendar offers a small, measurable gain (a few reclaimed minutes). But it makes you fragile, because one delay can destroy your entire day. A calendar with open space gives you room to absorb delays, pursue an unexpected opportunity, or let a conversation run past its hard stop. That is often where a passing thought becomes an idea of real value.
Over-optimisation can also ruin enjoyment.
If you’re trying to pick the “best” restaurant, you may spend hours comparing options, only to drag your partner down a rabbit hole over whether Asian-fusion or the ever-so-slightly-different Pan-Asian is better. By the time you book, you’re both frustrated and no longer looking forward to dinner. (Thanks, sis, for the anecdote.)
Once everything must be maximised, every moment competes with an imaginary better one and you can never actually enjoy the moment you are in. Even a free Sunday becomes something to optimise: the best walk, the best meal, the best use of the day. Eventually, even your freedom becomes a task.
It’s important to remember “wasting time” is not the same as distraction.
One of my favourite things to do is observe people pick up their phone and scroll through pointless notifications that they have already scrolled through ten times before. They find nothing new, pull themselves out of the present moment and scramble their brain with a dozen different stimuli. Then they swipe up, swipe once to the right and put the phone away again. What a strange use of existence.
Scrolling fills every gap before your mind can use it. Say you arrive thirty minutes early to meet a friend for coffee. With your phone, those thirty minutes go straight to other people’s news, arguments, and ideas. Without it, the first ten minutes are uncomfortable. Then new ideas, and the questions you’ve been avoiding, start to surface. It’s the same thirty minutes, and the only difference is who got to use them.
If you let yourself be constantly distracted, your life becomes a response to whatever is loudest: your inbox, an algorithm, someone else’s request, the next task. You stop living for yourself and can become highly efficient at pursuing a life you never properly chose, which is my biggest fear.
Questions I like to ask myself:
- What is the upside and downside of this activity. Is either of them bounded?
- Is this something I’m genuinely curious about? If so, it doesn’t need a justification. (Provided you can survive the downside, e.g. time or money spent).
- If free time causes me stress or guilt, whose standard am I failing? Question it and look it in the eye.
Ways to unoptimize time and let randomness enter your life:
- Physical wandering: Walk with no destination. Take the slower route. Go somewhere you’ve never had a reason to visit.
- Randomising your inputs: Read outside your field. Follow footnotes. Take a class with no career logic to it. (Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class for fun that ended up shaping Mac’s typography).
- People: Have a long lunch. Accept invitations that do not obviously fit. Speak to people outside your industry and age bracket.
- Leave time empty: Be bored on purpose. Sit with a problem before researching it.
- Small commitments to chance: Order the thing you don’t recognise. Treat a cancelled plan as an opening rather than a loss.
In sum
Unoptimised ("wasted") time has small, bounded cost (an afternoon), unbounded potential upside (an idea, a connection, a shift in direction). Don’t audit the payoffs regularly. They are rare and lumpy and usually visible only after they have already changed you.
Perhaps freedom is not having more time but feeling no need to defend how you use it.
Thank you to Sam Fuller, Sam Logan, Zara Lowe and Austin Martin-Webber for the pre-read.