De-optimizing

If the 20th century was about optimizing everything, I bet the 21st is about de-optimizing certain things. By de-optimizing, I mean making decisions about what is important, what is useful, and what is a distraction. Then, making the distractions less accessible, harder to get to, and more difficult to embrace. Think of it as a digital Walden. You optimize the important stuff, and de-optimize the superfluous.

It’s weird to say your life needs more friction. But I think mine does. Distractions are so easy to get to, there’s almost no good reason not to partake. Unless I count the one big reason: we all have big, important, useful work we could be doing.

I have essays to write, designs to finish, sketches to make, and friends and family to attend to. I’ve got enough meat for most of my day, and to gobble up more cotton candy than I need isn’t just dumb, it’s down right destructive. And I’ll be damned if that little bit of time I have left over is going to be devoted to fluff that isn’t nourishing. Give me fun, but give me substance.

What if my bookmarks were hard to get to? What if I stripped all the links out of the article I’m reading? What if I had to solve an algebra problem before jumping into Google Reader? Would I go? What if every time I turned on my TV, it told me that the average American spends 2 months watching television per year? Would I watch? What if I created a user account on my Mac with harsh parental controls called “Work”? (Ironic.) We can all do this on a personal level, but there could be whole businesses built on de-optimizing and short-circuiting distractions.

This might be the kind of curmudgeonly ranting associated with older people. But I’ll be damned if making harsh decisions that some things just aren’t worth your time isn’t the sign of an adult. Time to put on the grown-up pants.

Go ahead and believe there’s a such thing as a life well-wasted. We’re put here to be productive, not distracted.

Source: viafrank