Email tabs open, fitness app buzzing, a half-read productivity thread on X still glowing on the screen. Liam stares at his phone, then quietly locks it, slides it across the table and goes back to his pasta. No tracking, no “10 hacks to supercharge your week”, no timer running in the background. Just a plate, a glass of red, his flatmate talking about nothing in particular.
What’s strange is not that Liam has dropped the optimisation game tonight. It’s that he has dropped it, pretty much, for good. He still hits his deadlines, still pays his rent, still goes to the gym. But he’s stopped trying to “maximise” every minute.
When I ask him why, he shrugs and says, “I just got tired of treating my life like a start-up pitch deck.”
The way he says it sticks.
Why the most balanced people stop chasing “maximum” everything
Spend a week really watching people who look grounded – not in quotes on Instagram, but in real life. They’re rarely the ones planning their day down to the minute, or optimising their sleep with six different gadgets. They still use calendars and reminders, they still care. Just not with that tight, clenched energy you feel around someone who has turned life into a spreadsheet.
They let some messages wait. They skip a workout and don’t apologise to their watch. They order what they want, not what gives the best protein-to-calorie ratio. *Their lives look slightly “inefficient” from the outside, and strangely peaceful from the inside.*
What they seem to understand is this: the cost of “optimising everything” is paid in a currency we rarely name. Attention. Ease. The sense that you can just be, without having to constantly improve.
A study often shared in business circles is the famous “jam experiment” by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper. Shoppers at a supermarket were more likely to buy jam when they had 6 options than when they had 24. More choice looked better, felt worse. That same trap appears in our own lives when we try to optimise every choice we make.
Take Maya, a 33-year-old marketing manager I spoke to. At her peak of optimisation, she tracked her macros, her sleep cycles, deep work blocks, screen time, step count, monthly learning goals and how many “quality” conversations she had per week. Her Notion workspace looked like an air traffic control tower.
She hit her targets, mostly. But she also ended each week with a familiar cocktail of guilt and exhaustion. “There was always one metric that slipped,” she told me. “And that one number ruined everything else.” The day she deleted half her dashboards, she didn’t instantly feel happier. She mostly felt scared. But she also felt something else return: space.
Optimisation sounds rational. Why not make everything smoother, faster, better? The hidden problem is that our brains don’t treat optimisation as a neutral tool. They treat it like a score. Once you start rating every area of life, the game never stops.
Balanced people quietly opt out of that game. They still use tools, but they don’t let the tools define whether a day “counts”. Logically, it tracks: every decision has a “decision cost”. Every extra comparison – which gym, which routine, which habit stack – burns mental energy. At some point, the marginal gain from squeezing 3% more productivity out of your morning is lower than the mental tax of caring about it.
So they choose something rarer than efficiency: *“good enough” as a conscious strategy*. Not as resignation, but as a way to protect the parts of life that don’t fit into charts – affection, curiosity, being bored on a sofa with someone you like.
How balanced people actually live “good enough” without falling apart
The balanced people I met or observed tend to have one quiet habit in common: they pick a few things to care about deeply, and they deliberately let the rest be average. Not neglected. Just… average. Their work, their health, a relationship or two – those get their real focus. The rest runs on simple, almost boring rules.
One woman I spoke to, a GP in Manchester, calls it her “three-pillar rule”. She protects sleep, one hour of movement, and one honest conversation most days. Everything else is flexible. If work explodes, she orders takeaway without shame. If family needs her, her inbox waits. She isn’t trying to win at inbox zero and interior design and marathon training and side hustles all at once.
The exact pillars differ from person to person. The pattern doesn’t.
This approach sounds relaxed, but it’s weirdly structured. People who avoid constant optimisation often have small, stable routines they rarely question. Same breakfast most days. Same two or three default dinners. Same train, same walking route, same bedtime window.
That sameness doesn’t come from laziness. It comes from a clear decision: fewer micro-decisions, less cognitive noise. Once those basics are on autopilot, they free up mental bandwidth for what actually changes – projects, people, problems that matter. They’re not scrambling to optimise every corner; they’re building a floor they can stand on.
And here’s the logical twist: by not obsessing over mini-optimisations, they’re more present when life does throw something big at them. They have capacity left. Their mind isn’t already maxed out on “best possible” coffee brewing ratios and workout splits.
Practical ways to stop over-optimising without sliding into chaos
One simple method I heard again and again is brutally low-tech: the “bare minimum list”. Not goals for your ideal day. The minimum for a day that’s “good enough”. Three to five items, max. Things like: show up to work and do one real task. Eat something with actual nutrients. Text one person back.
On days when you feel strong, you’ll naturally do more. On days when you’re tired or flat, hitting that minimum still counts as a win. That’s the point. You’re building a baseline identity – “I am someone who at least does this” – rather than a fragile identity based on hitting ten targets.
Balanced people also set clear cut-off points. A latest time they’ll answer work messages. A number of times they’ll tweak a document before calling it done. A limit on how many apps or trackers they’re allowed to use at once. They decide these boundaries ahead of time, then try to live inside them like a house, not a cage.
One recurring mistake people confess is trying to optimise their way out of anxiety. Feeling behind at work? They add another productivity system. Feeling disconnected from friends? They create a “social dashboard”. It looks proactive. It’s really a way to avoid sitting with the discomfort that some things in life aren’t tidy, and never will be.
Another trap is copying someone else’s system wholesale. A YouTuber’s 5am routine, a founder’s bulletproof schedule, a creator’s colour-coded calendar. On paper, these systems promise control. In practice, they ignore your energy levels, your kids, your commute, your ADHD, your slow mornings.
Balanced people tend to do the opposite. They steal small bits that resonate and then ruthlessly throw away the rest. And when they “fail” at a system, they don’t decide they’re broken. They decide the system was just wrong for this season of their life. Soyons honnêtes : personne ne fait vraiment ça tous les jours.
“I stopped asking, ‘What’s the most efficient way to live?’” one software engineer told me. “Now I ask, ‘What’s a way to live that I won’t resent in five years?’ Efficiency looks different when you add time and resentment to the equation.”
There’s also something quietly radical about the small, protective rules they set for themselves. A few that came up often:
- No “life admin” after 9pm – the form can wait.
- Maximum two big priorities per day, not seven.
- One day a week that is gloriously unproductive on purpose.
On paper, that might sound like slowing down. In reality, it prevents burnout dressed up as ambition. It makes room for the messy, human parts of life that don’t show up in metrics – the argument on the sofa, the unexpected walk, the nap that saves the week. On a deeper level, it’s a way of saying: my worth isn’t a graph.
Living with room for error – and why that might be the real upgrade
We’re living in a culture that sells optimisation as self-love. Upgrade your morning, your workflow, your relationship communication style, your mycorrhizal gut health. Some of that is genuinely helpful. Some of it is just new packaging for the old fear of not being enough.
People who feel balanced aren’t free of that fear. They just stop feeding it second by second. They leave some edges rough. They accept that a “wasted” afternoon scrolling, once in a while, is not a moral failure. It’s just a human brain sagging a little under the weight of being alive in 2026.
On a train recently, I watched a man in his fifties read an actual paperback novel, slowly, no headphones in, no phone on the table. He looked almost out of place. On a packed carriage of glowing screens, he was the only one not trying to optimise the trip by answering three messages, finishing a deck and half-listening to a podcast. On a deeper level, he was doing something many of us secretly crave: one thing at a time.
On a train recently, I watched a man in his fifties read an actual paperback novel, slowly, no headphones in, no phone on the table. He looked almost out of place. We have all lived that moment where a quiet choice feels almost rebellious. On a packed carriage of glowing screens, he was the only one not trying to optimise the trip by answering messages, finishing a deck and half-listening to a podcast. He was doing something many of us secretly crave: one thing at a time.
The more you pay attention, the more you see small acts like this everywhere. A parent at the playground without their phone. A colleague who ends the meeting on time, not stretched into “just one more thing”. A friend who says, “I’m not tracking my steps anymore, it was making me weird.” These don’t look like revolutions. They’re more like tiny, quiet rejections of the idea that life has to be constantly tweaked to be worthwhile.
So maybe the question isn’t “How do I squeeze the most out of my day?” Maybe it’s closer to “What kind of day could I live with, if nothing changed for a while?” Balanced people seem to live closer to that question. They don’t have perfect systems. They have room. Room to be slightly late. Room to get bored. Room to feel sad without immediately turning it into content or a problem to be solved.
If that sounds slow, or scary, that’s understandable. Letting go of optimisation feels, at first, like dropping your armour. But you might notice something interesting when you do. Under all the dashboards and habits and hacks, there’s still a person who knows roughly what matters to them. A person who doesn’t need to be optimised to be real.
| Point clé | Détail | Intérêt pour le lecteur |
|---|---|---|
| Choisir quelques priorités | Focaliser sur 2–3 piliers (santé, travail, relations) et simplifier le reste | Réduit la charge mentale et la culpabilité permanente |
| Adopter un “bare minimum” | Définir une courte liste de gestes quotidiens suffisants pour une journée “ok” | Stabilise l’estime de soi sans dépendre de performances maximales |
| Mettre des limites aux systèmes | Limiter apps, trackers, optimisations par saison de vie | Préserve l’énergie psychique et la sensation de liberté |
FAQ :
- Isn’t optimisation just being responsible and ambitious?It can be. The problem starts when optimisation turns into self-surveillance, where every off-day feels like failure and rest becomes another thing to manage.
- How do I know if I’m over-optimising my life?If you often feel guilty when you’re not “productive”, constantly tweak your systems, or struggle to enjoy free time without tracking it, you’re probably past the helpful point.
- Won’t lowering the bar make me lazy?Most people find the opposite. A realistic “good enough” baseline stops the all-or-nothing swings between intense hustle and total collapse.
- Can I be high-performing and still avoid optimising everything?Yes. Many top performers obsess in a few domains and keep the rest of life deliberately simple, using routines instead of endless hacks.
- Where should I start if I want to step back from constant optimisation?Pick one area – maybe sleep, work, or exercise – and remove one layer of tracking or rules for a month. Watch how you feel before changing anything else.
