12/13/2025

In order to devise a practical method to optimize the quality of life, we must first find the principles we want to follow. Only via the specification we'll be able to find the implementation.

I named the note "Principles" in order to avoid the more pretentious title "Principles of life", despite its purpose is more clearly stated by the latter name.

A day is 24 hours long

I think this maxim is the ruling principle of both daily productivity & life designing. The latter might be more acurrately represented by the analogous claim that "life is, at best, roughly 90 years long".

There're some easy theorems we can deduce from those assertions:

• Optimizing the return, given that the time window is fixed, is equivalent to optimizing the return of time invested.
• In order to optimize the return, we must take decisions (as time is finite). Thus, optimizing the return entails taking the "right" decisions.

Global vs. local phenomenon

The global vs. local phenomenon is one of the first problems we need to sort in life optimization (as well as in any other optimization problem).

See Global vs. local for an in-depth discussion.

You can also check the note on Simulated annealing.

Thought stream

Our thought stream has a great disadvantage: it follows a depth-first search path over our mind. This is because when we have some thought in our mind, we are far more likely to hop to a related topic than to some unrelated thing we've had in our mind four thoughts ago. Of course, if we want to maximize the return of time invested we must first optimize how we invest thinking time. Thus, we might first be able to prioritize the tasks one needs to concentrate on (this corresponds to a Dijkstra traversal). And the most probable scenario is that the priority order does not coincide with a simple DFS order, i.e., when we let our mind wander we will probably spend a lot of time on things we actually don't value that much. This is related to the fact that we do not have willpower.

My current workflow to overcome is using an adaptation of the inbox tray. Essentially, everything that catches my eye but does not deserve immediate attention goes to the inbox tray. Currently, I only possess physical "INBOX" tray and plenty of paper cards to scribble down my ideas. Every night I go though the inbox and triage the topic accordingly. Ideally, I imagine that the inbox should be more versatile in the sense of being able to capture everything: incoming emails, messages, websites, thoughts, etc.

Metrics

In order to become better at any activity, you must record metrics about how you're performing in it. E.g., if you want to become better at time manamgent, you must know how do you spend your time so that you can both measure progress and also identify weak areas. Thus, a personal development framework must include relevant metrics which track things like quality of life, return, utility, etc.