Lessons from the Year of Efficiency

My theme for 2024 was the Year of Efficiency, which was my way of nudging myself to think about adulthood and how to cope with the growing scarcity of time and energy. As a child you have the luxury of spending hours molding a perfect square of Blu Tack or trying to translate your favourite manga with a pre-schooler’s understanding of Japanese and early-stage Google Translate. As an adult that is less practical.

Some examples of efficiency-related things I did: I organised my digital workspace; started walking more as a means of transport + exercise; stopped procrastinating on adult things e.g. buying insurance and getting new glasses; systematised my exercise routines; started using a notebook for work-related to-do lists.

There are some broader takeaways that I wanted to share.

Lesson 1: Efficiency is not needing to think.

I like having many options in front of me, and weighing them in my head. This is especially the case when it comes to my pet topics, like what restaurant to eat at (and what meal to eat at the restaurant) or what movie to see. Unfortunately, it can be quite paralysing.

I’m also a lazy person. I might ponder the issue intensely, then stop short of acting. And then at a later date when I pick the issue back up again, I might have forgotten the entire train of thought I had already gone through, and have to run it through again.

A big source of efficiency was found in cutting down the time spent pondering, and forcing myself to make decisions faster.

For once-off decisions (e.g. what movie to watch), I tried to set aside a fixed amount of time to make this decision, and be okay with not landing on a ‘perfect’ outcome. I was dreading buying glasses for some reason, but I set aside one evening after work to browse the optical shops in a nearby mall. The process was much quicker than I imagined.

For recurring decisions, I created mental systems to speed up the decision process. When arranging dinner plans with a new friend or acquaintance that I wanted to get to know better, I used to scour Google Maps for restaurants that would seem cool and fit everyone’s tastes. Ultimately I realised that all that matters is having a space for good conversation, so I came up with a short list of go-to restaurants that were reliable and had decent acoustics.

And for exercise, I set up a weekly yoga routine with my good friend who lives within walking distance of my house, and started holding weekly football sessions for fellow amateur friends. The ‘not thinking’ there was two-fold – firstly that it was a habit getting wired into my brain, but secondly that the social pressure (especially for football, where I was the only person in the group bringing the football) would quell any wasteful thoughts of whether or not I should flake.

Lesson 2: Efficiency is delegation.

I think it’s good to know how to do things yourself, and indeed it can be satisfying knowing you did something your way. However, if the intention is to get the thing done efficiently, I finally clocked what all managers already know – it’s way more efficient to delegate out the work.

First there’s the delegation of responsibilities to experts. Getting a financial advisor was something I resisted for a long time. A part of me honestly thought they might be evil. Once I got past that, I still thought there was a big chance for such insurance companies to go bust and not make good on the returns.

But eventually I decided to delegate out two things: (a) delegating the handling of my monies relating to accidents and major health incidents to a seemingly reliable expert, and (b) delegating the evaluation of the insurance industry, including its potential downfall, to society at large (who had deemed that such a downfall seems to be unlikely). Sometimes, you gotta be content to go with the masses – just hedge your bets accordingly.

Then there’s the delegation of responsibilities to a team. In the latest edition of my living room, TEDx-style conference Teck Whye Convention, I was running on a time crunch because the event coincided with a stressful few weeks at work, and I just didn’t have enough time to get out the finishing touches for the conference. Thankfully, some friends had offered to come early to help out.

Previously, I used to worry that my friends would feel burdened if I gave them tasks to do, so for a long time I opted to keep all the work to myself. I now understand that they truly want to help. But I need to also honour them by delegating work in a way that empowers them, not frustrates them – e.g. by making sure they can help themselves to the resources they need, by giving them the overall vision and autonomy to do the task as they see fit.

So I spent a small window of time the night before writing out a list of every task I needed help with, listing out each object/tool/item they’d need and putting those items next to the list. This included tasks like making a banner for the door, arranging the tea and coffee, and pasting up signs to the toilet or for the Wi-fi password. When they arrived and as I was knee-deep in cooking food for 20 people, I pointed them to the list and they took it from there. The happy side-effect was that the gathering felt even more like a community effort than before.

Lesson 3: Efficiency is figuring out the ‘good-enough’.

Most of the time I cook for the gatherings I host. The reason is because I enjoy cooking, and I want to feed my guests. However, I am also ambitious, and have often ended up tacking on more and more constraints – it must be nutritionally complete, it must feature a new cuisine or new dishes that my guests have not tried before, it must show off my creativity.

But like ChatGPT, if you keep piling on the constraints, it starts forgetting some of them. And at some point I was forgetting that at the end of the day, people just want to be fed something inoffensive at a gathering, and that I should be enjoying the cooking. There’s no point making a fancy dal ¹ and burning it when good ol’ Japanese curry would have sufficed.

Another example was a talk I gave for Teck Whye Convention – a topic I was really excited to explore, on the history and analysis of the R&B genre. I was splicing audio files and making flowcharts in hopes of giving a show-stopping presentation. In the end, a lot of the effort didn’t bear fruit because I didn’t establish a connection between the audience and the topic at hand – I assumed everyone had a connection with R&B and shared the same starting point as I did.

The ‘good-enough’ factor is often very simple. You just need to figure out what it is. For presentations or anything relating to teaching/sharing, it might be about setting the scene to get the audience to see your point of view. For big group dinners, it might be about picking a recipe that maximises for simplicity and yumminess. I think for any project, investing a small amount of time into figuring out the ‘good-enough’ factor will always be worth it.

So that’s my year. 2024 was a year with lots of external efficiency projects – but I think 2025 might be heavier on the inner work. Sneak peek here.

1. The well-informed reader will note that dals are not meant to be fancy. Reader, I have now learned that lesson. ↩︎