The Illusion of Optimization

We see this everywhere. The automated phone menu with 26 options that ensures you never speak to a human. The software update that streamlines the interface by hiding the one tool you use 96% of the time. We are living in a world built by people who have fallen in love with the elegance of their own flowcharts. They’ve mistaken the map for the territory, the process for the purpose. The core frustration isn’t that things are complex; it’s that they are brittle. They are designed for a perfect-path scenario, and the moment reality introduces a slight deviation-a weak thumb, a misplaced click, a question not on the script-the entire system shatters into uselessness.

I used to be one of them. I confess. My first major project was redesigning a workflow for a logistics company. I spent weeks mapping every step, shaving off 46 seconds here, another 6 seconds there. I presented my masterpiece, a process so tight you couldn’t slip a piece of paper between the steps. It was beautiful on paper. It worked beautifully in practice for exactly 6 days. Then a supplier was late, a forklift broke down, and the whole system seized up like a rusted engine. My “optimized” process had zero resilience. It had no room to breathe, no capacity to absorb shock. I’d built a glass engine, mistaking fragility for precision.

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It reminds me of a conversation I had with Sky P., a woman who genuinely optimized assembly lines for a living. I went in expecting to hear about seconds and motion studies. Instead, she talked about “purposeful slack.” She told me, “The goal isn’t to get the line moving at its theoretical maximum. The goal is to ensure it never, ever has to stop completely.” She intentionally built in buffers, small, designated pauses and resource pools that looked like pure waste on a spreadsheet but were actually the system’s immune response. They were the margin that made the whole thing work when reality, as it always does, showed up unannounced.

Sky made one part slower to make the whole more reliable.

The Myth of Infinite Choice

I fell into this trap at home, too. I got obsessed with optimizing my media consumption. I had 6 different streaming services, each with its own app, its own watchlist, its own algorithm feeding me what it thought I wanted. It was a fragmented, inefficient mess designed to look like infinite choice. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize that what I actually wanted wasn’t more choice, but less friction. I just wanted one place, a simple interface to find what I wanted to watch. It’s why services like a unified Abonnement IPTV become appealing; they solve the real problem, which isn’t a lack of content, but a lack of coherence. My elaborate system of apps and logins was the home-entertainment version of my first failed logistics project-brittle and annoying. The real goal wasn’t to manage 6 platforms perfectly; it was to relax and watch a movie. We lose the plot so easily.

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Sky P. told me her most successful project involved increasing the time it took to complete one specific task by 6 seconds. It seemed insane to her managers. Her job was to cut time, not add it. But that small delay created a buffer that prevented a downstream bottleneck which had been causing, on average, 16-minute shutdowns twice a day. Her “inefficient” tweak saved over 36 minutes of productivity daily. This is the kind of thinking that spreadsheets hate and reality loves. It’s the wisdom to see the whole system, not just the isolated parts.

Find the Grain, Not the Force

It’s like peeling an orange. You can attack it with brute force, ripping the peel into 26 tiny, frustrating pieces and getting pith all over your fingers. That’s the optimization mindset. Or, you can find the grain, the natural line of separation, and with a bit of patience, the whole thing comes off in one clean, beautiful spiral. Our work, our systems, our lives-they all have a grain. The hyper-optimizers come with knives and stopwatches, ignoring the inherent nature of the thing itself. The wise find the spiral. They don’t impose a system; they reveal the one that was already there, waiting to be seen.

Measuring What Truly Matters

We have been taught to worship the god of metrics, but we are consistently measuring the wrong things. We measure tasks completed, not value created. We measure hours worked, not problems solved. We measure activity, not progress. The most valuable work is often unquantifiable. How do you measure the trust built in a 46-minute conversation that went completely off-topic? How do you measure the breakthrough idea that came during a long walk, not during a scheduled “ideation session”? By the logic of the spreadsheet, these are moments of zero productivity. In reality, they are often where everything important happens.

The most advanced technology, the most elegant process, is the one that bends to us, not the one that demands we break for it.