You spent last year running on fumes. With the new year, you’re thinking: if I could just find the right system, the right routine, the right approach—I’d finally get ahead without feeling so depleted.

So you’re looking at optimization. Morning routines. Energy management. Productivity systems. Focus hacks.

Before you go down that road, it’s worth asking: what are you actually optimizing for—and who benefits?

The Sleight of Hand

There’s a sleight of hand happening with the word “optimize.”

The dictionary definition, make something as good as possible, has become “make profit as good as possible” in the workplace.

Employment always pays you less than the value you create—that’s how margin works. When a company talks about optimization, they’re widening that gap. More extraction from the same headcount, framed as efficiency. The language sounds collaborative and smart (“Let’s optimize our resources”), but the benefits aren’t for you.

It’s easy to adopt optimization as a personal virtue, especially if you’re a high performer. But inevitably, you start applying profit logic to yourself. Rest becomes inefficiency. Play becomes wasted time. Relationships come with ROI. Emotions that slow you down become bugs to fix. You forget you’re the “something” in the original definition to “make better” too—not just your output.

The Trap

When you internalize optimization, you start managing yourself the way a manager would. Squeezing more out. Calling it commitment. Feeling guilty when you can’t sustain it.

You ask:

“How can I be more productive?”

“How do I focus better?“

“How do I recover quicker?”

Instead of:

“Why am I so depleted?”

“Is this meaningful?“

“Why do I need to recover from my daily life?”

You look for efficiency hacks instead of challenging unreasonable demands.

You blame your work ethic, habits, and discipline—not the system you’re operating in.

You adapt yourself to unsustainable conditions—and call your humanity inefficiencies.

But you’re not a machine. You’re a mammal with biological needs, emotions, and a nervous system. Your energy fluctuates. Your focus has limits. Your body has rhythms and cycles that exist regardless of your deadlines.

It’s Not Just You

The pressure to optimize is everywhere. Look around, and you can see what happens when the margin is never wide enough.

Movies, architecture, healthcare—all optimized for margin. Films designed for franchise potential and brand deals. Buildings that look the same in every city because the math worked out. Fifteen-minute appointments with your doctor because throughput beats care.

This is what happens when optimization for profit becomes the priority. The artistry, culture, and soul get engineered out.

Here’s another way to see it: You’re not burned out because you’re bad at optimizing. You’re burned out because you’re inside a system that optimizes everything—including you.

Before You Optimize

You can’t control the system. But you have agency in what and how you optimize. Optimization isn’t inherently bad (remember, it means to make something as good as possible). When it cuts unnecessary meetings, removes friction from frustrating processes, or helps you save time—it’s useful. The problem is when it stops serving you and starts extracting things you can’t get back.

Consider these four things before you optimize—so you don’t lose yourself.

1. Name what you’re actually doing.

Before optimizing anything, get honest: is this making your life better or making you easier to extract from? There’s nothing wrong with being good at your job. But “good at your job” is different than “squeezing yourself dry for someone else’s margin.” Name which one you’re doing.

2. Set a floor, not just a ceiling.

Optimization culture obsesses over maximums—peak performance, highest output. But you can’t sustain a ceiling without a floor. What’s the baseline you won’t drop below? How much rest is non-negotiable? What will you not miss for work? Which values of yours will you never sacrifice for performance? Optimize above the floor, not at the expense of it.

3. Interrogate the constraint before optimizing within it.

If you’re trying to optimize your schedule to fit in more work, pause. Is the approach sound? Is the workload reasonable? Is the deadline real? Sometimes the smartest move isn’t better time management—it’s challenging the demand itself.

4. Optimize your life, not just your usefulness.

What would it mean to make your free time as good as possible? Your health? Your relationships? If this question feels indulgent, it tells you something about what optimization culture has already done to your head.

The Real Question

Optimization isn’t the enemy. But adopting it without question, and sacrificing parts of you to meet demands that don’t benefit you? That’s not self-improvement, it’s efficient self-destruction.

Before you optimize anything this year, ask yourself: Does this serve me, or extract from me?

One of those is worth your energy. The other will just use it up.

I help burned-out people rebuild their lives. Book a discovery call if you like an objective thought partner to think through optimization that improves your life, not just your output.