Edouardo Honig
Published: 11 Feb 2025. Last updated: 11 Feb 2025.
Are you performing everyday actions that take up too much of your time? Do you take longer to choose when given many options? Or have you been confronted by decisions which feel truly difficult?
Well, have you ever considered trying to make your life easier? What does that even look like?
I argue that many things, big and small, can and should be made easier.
If you're like most students and office workers in the United States, you're probably spending much of your day using a computer besides your phone. How much do you use your mouse/trackpad versus your keyboard? Are you clicking on File -> Save to save files or using the keyboard shortcut for your file system/program? Do you know how to change between, open, and close windows and tabs with only the keyboard?
When navigating from place to place, you should always know the fastest routes. The only reason not to take it is if there is some other benefit besides time: often this benefit may be related to aesthetics.
These small efficiency gains can lead to large accumulated time savings.
You should know where all of your things are. Clothes should be stored in some orderly fashion. So should shoes, cooking implements, personal accessories, and so on. The same goes for files and resources on computers and the internet. Use bookmarks in your browser, and sort them appropriately. Most importantly, you should also organize your time across different scales with memos, to-do lists, schedules, and calendars.
Your life will be much easier if you don't need to spend time looking for things, and this can be easily achieved by preemptively mapping out your time and space.
By far the most impactful quality of life improvement one can do is the implementation of rules. There exist a myriad of externally dictated laws that one must follow throughout their life, restricting one's actions for presumably their or society's benefit. But one of the most powerful things you can do is to make decisions ahead of time by creating rules for yourself. This is similar to making a to-do list, but on a grander scale.
A former alcoholic might make a rule to never drink again. The child of a gambler may forbid themselves from entering a casino. These self-made rules aim to remove temptation out of desire to avoid ruin. Besides catastrophe prevention, we should also aim to self-regulate out the smaller potential problems in our life. In fact, many daily rituals are a product of pseudo-rules, such as brushing teeth or showering to maintain hygiene. The reason I say pseudo is because these sometime get broken for various reasons, such as being too tired. Application timers on phones are a great example of this.
The rules you make to improve your life should be oaths that are never broken.
Why do this? Because it completely removes decision making, a burden on ones' finite willpower, from a situation. For example, a rule that limits the time spent on ordering food at a restaurant will motivate you to choose quickly and decisively. A personal oath to only loan money that you would be okay with not being repaid should eradicate worry related to lending. And making rules with regards to relationships is an excellent way to bypass the typical emotional inertia related to romance. After all, when you convert decisions to the product of rules, the outcomes cannot be helped, as they were preordained.
So you should be creating your own rules, and be wary of rules or promises that you won't keep. For small things this may be initially tough, and I recommend avoiding setting too many rules at once. But the payoff of well-designed rules for all matters is truly the greatest.
You can make your life easier by wasting less time and energy in two major ways:
The potential payoff is immense, and it's easy to start. So please, at least try to make your life easier.
This post may as well be titled "You should be more efficient" or "How to stop wasting time thinking".
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