Thoughts on Efficiency

efficient (adjective):

• (of a person) working in a well-organized and competent way.
• (of a system or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.

As someone juggling a lot — kids, work, hobbies — I spend significant time refining my weekly routine. Over the years, it has evolved into a well-oiled machine, and I wanted to document some of the strategies that have worked for me. Like any mature system, it’s a mix of personal experience and ideas absorbed from countless forgotten articles and podcasts. This post is as much a reflection as it is a resource for anyone looking to improve how they use their time.

Efficiency does not directly equate to being productive and getting more done (my former colleague Jacob Kaplan-Moss has some insightful thoughts on this¹). Rather, it’s an iterative process that helps you make optimal use of your time. My overarching goal is to optimize the time I spend on things that bring me joy — including work, but also many other aspects of life.

Overarching Rules

With over a decade of professional experience in software engineering, cloud, and security, I’ve developed three core principles I refer to as my “overarching rules”.

Identify your productive patterns

This may sound obvious, but you need to understand your goals, motivations, strengths, and pitfalls. When are you most productive? What can you tackle when you’re fatigued? For me, the morning is prime time for mentally demanding tasks, while the afternoons are better suited for repetitive or less taxing work.

Exercise agency over your time

Every choice has a cost of opportunity, so it’s worth evaluating candidly how you’re spending your time. Not everything enjoyable is worth your time. For example, while I find gaming thrilling, spending four hours playing Counter-Strike equates to skipping a couple of BJJ training sessions. That tradeoff isn’t worth it for me. Take the time to identify your priorities — what truly brings you joy and a sense of accomplishment. Once you’ve determined what matters most, be intentional about how you allocate your time. If something doesn’t align with your priorities, desired lifestyle, or long-term goals, it’s okay to let it go.

Be kind to yourself

You won’t always be at your best, and that’s okay. Aim for a consistently high baseline². The challenge is recognizing when you’re approaching burnout versus when you just need to push through. Luckily, there are ways to maintain efficiency even during low-energy or low-motivation periods (more on this later).

Strategies

Here are some concrete strategies to live by the overarching rules.

Define your intentions clearly, then focus on taking action

Planning tasks is the cornerstone of my weekly routine and has been instrumental in supporting my mental health. I’ll usually start the week by planning ahead for the week to come (this takes around an hour on most weeks, unless I have to think about strategy), and then review and update my tasks and goals every morning (~15 minutes). While this requires non-trivial time, the benefits are worth it (for me):

• Separating planning from doing frees up a lot of mental space during execution. It means that when I’m working, I’m… working — I’m not trying to figure out what I should be working on, whether it’s actually important, or whether I’ll have time to reach my goals.
  • My current workflow uses https://obsidian.md/ with the https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-calendar-plugin and https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-periodic-notes plugins, and I’m quite happy with it.
• Honing your planning skills means that over time, you get much better at evaluating how long a task or project component should take to complete.
  • Pro tip: Tasks usually take longer than expected. Adding extra time to your estimate usually brings you closer to reality.
• Context switching is a major productivity killer. Some degree of context switching is unavoidable, but I plan in order to limit how much this happens.
• Breaking down large tasks into smaller, actionable steps helps prevent stagnation and the feeling of being overwhelmed by big projects.

That said, plans will change, and that’s okay. Work is a queue, and sometimes you need to shift things around. That said, if something is repeatedly postponed, consider whether it’s worth doing at all.

Goals are helpful, but focus on creating habits

While I do spend some time thinking about medium and long-term goals, habits determine how successful you are in the long run. I tend to focus on routines over aspirations, because they are much more actionable. My approach to planning also fosters habits (periodic notes are helpful here). For example, if the planning schedules X amount of training sessions, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll be able to hit all of them, but over time, it encourages me to exercise more consistently.

A few rules of thumb when identifying and implementing recurring tasks (i.e. building habits):

• Experiment to find what works best for your unique schedule and mindset. This is an iterative, continuous process.
• Be realistic about your available time and energy. If you’re constantly planning for an unmanageable workload, you’re bound to feel like you’re underperforming. That said, aiming for slightly more than you think you can accomplish (say 10%) will make you more efficient in the long run and avoid the outcome of Parkinson’s Law (Work expands to fill the time available for its completion).
• Reassess your target routine often, to ensure it’s achievable and aligned with your current priorities.
• Leverage tools that help build habits. The periodic notes plugin I mentioned previously allows you to do this.

Hack your productivity by managing your motivation

This is where it pays to know thyself. Sometimes you’ll be tired (e.g. your kids were sick all night, and you managed to get 4 hours of broken sleep spread across a half dozen intervals — but that’s just every other week, so you’re rolling with it.), or unmotivated or affected by events outside of your control. Here are a few things I do to maintain efficiency in these situations:

• Tackle hard or unpleasant tasks first, as well as those that require the most mental strain. If you aren’t able to get through them at the top of the day, it’s unlikely that you will do so in the afternoon.
  • Starting with tasks that ease you into “work mode” can be effective. For me, this usually involves reviewing my daily plan, but it could also include activities like answering messages, reviewing pull requests, reading an article, etc.
• Recognize tasks that are beyond your (current) capabilities. If you’re not in a state that will allow you to do hard tasks, it’s better to find easier tasks and get those done, rather than procrastinating and getting nothing done in the end.
• Similarly, identify which tasks you find fun or energizing, and use them as motivation or filler between harder work.
• Recognize tasks that consistently drain you and either eliminate, delegate, or approach them differently. Getting things done is as important as identifying whether things are actually worth the effort, and deleting work reasonably is a successful strategy when aiming for efficiency.

Care for your ecosystem

As you refine your strategies, remember to nurture the foundation they rely on — your well-being and environment. No one is better equipped to take care of you than you are. Some non-negotiables include:

• Invest as much effort in resting and recharging as you do in being productive. Sleep, diet, and exercise form the foundation of a healthy, happy brain (and of sustained efficiency as a useful side effect).
• Create an environment that promotes focus, comfort, and joy. This is easier if you’re working remotely and have enough space for a dedicated workspace.
  • Pay attention to ergonomics: proper setup reduces strain and distractions.
  • Keep your workspace peaceful and inspiring to support flow states. For me that means keeping things minimalistic and tidy.

Tradeoffs

Our strengths often come paired with inherent weaknesses. A few challenges I’ve noticed with my approach include:

• High organization can limit flexibility. Adapting to unexpected changes isn’t always my strong suit, but I find it a (mostly) acceptable tradeoff.
• Certain activities, like working out, require routine and planning (e.g. if you’ve just had lunch, then you can’t complete this activity). Unplanned changes to the schedule can create a cascading effect, disrupting other priorities.

If you’ve applied any of these strategies — or have developed your own — I’d love to hear how they work for you! Feel free to reach out (see the links on the bottom left).

Many thanks to Pierre-Luc Senécal and Jacob Kaplan-Moss for their insightful comments and feedback.