Iterating IRL

Most of the optimizing I do in life is optimizing software, but I've realized in the last few months that what makes a machine go brrr is not the same as what makes me go brrr.

Min/maxing

An easy win for optimizing code is to minimize iterations. Going through a list of things takes time (bless your heart, Python), and doing it twice times takes twice as much time—so if you're going to do a bunch of things to a list of stuff, it's most efficient to traverse the list once and do everything you need to do for each element in list while you're there, 'cause you aren't coming back to it again.

I've often tried this "do everything in one pass" approach for...normal everyday stuff. Folding laundry, doing dishes, going back though all of my posts and fixing their metadata. I thought it was an efficiency gain to do as much as I could in one pass (and maybe it theoretically is?), but eventually I noticed that it's absolutely grueling and unsustainable for me.

I think it comes down to the cognitive burden of context switching. Folding laundry, for example, with the "iterate once" approach, might mean taking an item, flipping it right-side-out if necessary, and placing it in a very specific pile (so that at the end each pile requires no additional sorting, it can just go to the right end destination). Optimal! But the mental effort and decision-making required to check if each item if inside out, switch my brain to go through the particular topological manipulations for the given clothing article (flipping a sock is different from flipping a shirt), fold them as needed, and remember or re-invent a textile taxonomy on the fly to know where to sort it is just too much for my little acorn brain to bear. It's exhausting. I can't think that much.

Re-laxing

One day, dreading the slog, I decided to just to the bare minimum for each step, iteration count be damned. Put everything into loose piles based on clothing type. Take another pass to flip/fold each pile. Divvy up piles into where they need to go and then take multiple trips to actually put them there. Way less optimal, way less miserable. It may even just be less miserable because I'm giving up on being optimal, and don't have half of my brain spinning in the background trying to judge whether I've min/maxed domesticity well enough to get a fold% world record.

One way to rationalize why this is nicer is that, despite going through the list of things to complete multiple times, you get to "specialize" differently each pass and do just one thing well, instead of trying to switch between half a dozen things over and over again.

I keep forgetting the "specialize and repeat" approach is easier for me, and have to relearn it all the time. I dredged a quarter of the way through fixing post metadata, one post at a time, until I remembered that was a stupid way to do things in any other context, and I should just focus on one change at a time.

Other niceties

Another bonus is that it gives you a nice stopping point. If I need to stop organizing posts in the next 2 minutes, I can finish up my current iteration and then I just have to remember what the task for the next iteration was going to be, instead of remembering exactly where I left off and what the context of my decision-making was and what standards I was following.

It's also great for computer tasks, because if you're doing something that you can copy-paste, you end up doing a lot more pasting that copying.