What is our ultimate goal here, productivity or happiness? I have often fallen into the same trap of assuming that I should become more and more efficient, only to realize that I am missing out on the joys of being human. Our time is fixed, every time we say “yes” to something, we are saying “no” to something else. There’s more to life than information.

Hyper-efficient is an excellent way of putting it. You’re absolutely right that we cannot win the fight to make everything simple.

However, if we take the initial time out to organise ourselves properly, we can still simplify regular tasks greatly. A bit of extra work at the outset can ease and speed up the execution of many tasks.

With ever-growing choice and information, I’ve personally stopped worrying that I’ve missed something vitally important, because it’s less relevant. So long as we generally know where we need to look and have the right methods to digest that information effectively, it’s unlikely to cause a problem, even for specialists.

And the changes in the world still don’t necessarily mean a need for increased stress-management in my opinion. With the right mindset, focus, and simplifications through initial organisation, we should all be able to achieve hyper-efficiency, getting more done in less time. I’m going to be positive and say that I don’t think it’s so far-fetched.

Thanks for the comments guys. You make a good point Martin about how, even though there are so many more demands and choices in our life, most of it is watered down nowadays so that we wouldn’t really be missing out after all.

And Abe, I completely forgot about happiness in all this. I think the reason much of this is relevant nowadays is because we define ourselves by our careers, our reputations etc. Though everyone wants to be happy, I wonder how many people actually have it defined as their ultimate goal.

You make a good point. Technology surely changed the way we view things. Instead of practicing the basics, we advance to a certain point and forget about the important elements.

So true. Because we want our lives to be simple, we have taken for granted those useful lessons which could help us in our daily lives.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

This sounds like a very bad plan indeed. It’s kind of like saying we’re not interested in bettering people’s health but to teach them how to deal with the pain.