024 • A 'sub-optimal' perspective on time-management

Hello again, and welcome to Fundamentalised,

This week, I was hit with the reality of my growing workload.

My time's spread between writing online, launching PARAZETTEL V2 and being a university student. The latter includes everything from attending lectures and tutorials to going to the gym and playing 6-aside football.

This caused me to think quite a lot about my time management and how we can prioritise the hours we spend on Earth in general.

I made one important observation that I want to share with you in this issue.

Optimisation is one of the most popular tactics employed by the time-management-aware. They perfect their actions, meaning they lose no stray seconds through the performing of an activity.

I'd raise the claim that not all things are better 'optimised'. ‘Optimising’ is risky - the chance of error increases the less thorough you are with your work.

Say you have an important essay to write. There's no point looking for workarounds when it comes to sitting down and writing the 2000 words. You're going to have to put in the hours either way, optimisation or not.

You should, instead of focusing on doing less of everything, just do less of the less important things.

Less scrolling on social media, less checking your inbox, less time watching TV.

If you can eliminate unimportant activities like these, I'll guarantee you won't have to 'optimise' the things that matter. You'll have time to double and triple-check your work, delivering your projects to a higher level with plenty of time to spare.

I made this observation and immediately deleted the apps that had built up on my phone to distract me. Less time scrolling today has meant more time for me to write this newsletter. In the future, it will give me more time to build PARAZETTEL, more time to train in the gym, and more time to write the looming university essay over my head.

Don't optimise - eliminate low-quality, unimportant activities and you won't need to.

See you next week! (I'm hoping I'll have dug myself a little further out of this mound of workload that has built up around me by then.)

— Theo

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What I’ve written this week…

Using Obsidian to Build a Website - How does the note-taking app perform? (Note - I now use Substack for Fundamentalised, but this was written whilst using Obsidian Publish.)

The 4 Obsidian Workflows Driving My Daily PKM - What my day-to-day Obsidian usage entails…

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Quote of the week…

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.” — Annie Dillard, from Austin Kleon’s article Spend it all every time