Is It Worth It?
Sep. 22, 2021
Read time: 1 minutes and 57 seconds.
tags:I love this chart. It makes me laugh and smile about the times i’ve spent not adhering to a guideline such as this comic. I’ve been caught in an endless loop of trying to be more efficient to a futile end where I ended up throwing it out.
It’s a quirky deep dive into the world of productivity, where saving a second might just end up costing you a whole day.
So how does it work?
- Say you obsessively must check your email for work or something. It takes 5 seconds, but you do it 50 times a day…
You can spend up to five days over five years trying to make it quicker. Five days! That’s like binge-watching an entire TV series. Instead of finding a way to automate your inbox, you could be catching up on all those shows you’ve been meaning to watch!
Now, scale it up a bit.
Suppose you manage to save 30 seconds on a task you do five times a day. This time-saving heroism gives you three days of wiggle room to optimize it. Spend more than that, and you’re back to square one. It’s a delicate dance between the thrill of efficiency and the slippery slope of diminishing returns.
- Look at the bigger tasks – those time-consuming beasts that devour an hour. Maybe it’s the weekly team meeting that somehow stretches into lunchtime.
If you can trim this down, you’ve got ten months over five years to streamline it. Anything more, and you’re better off just bringing snacks to the meeting.
And then there are the gargantuan six-hour tasks – the monthly monsters like end-of-month reports or quarterly tax prep. The chart gives you two months over five years to find a way to cut these down to size. Any longer, and you’re just gnawing away at your own time.
The chart also humorously tackles the tiniest of tasks – those annual annoyances like renewing a subscription or resetting a password. If these shave off mere seconds, you’ve got five seconds to optimize. Anything beyond that, and you’re just spinning your wheels.
This chart is a fun reminder of the trade-offs in the quest for efficiency.
It’s a delicate balance: save time without letting the optimization process consume you. If you’re caught up trying to streamline your daily grind, take a step back. Maybe, just maybe, the time you spend optimizing could be better spent enjoying a coffee, taking a walk, or simply kicking back and relaxing.
Sometimes, good enough is good enough, and those extra seconds are better spent savoring life’s little moments.