Talk of optimising is everywhere these days, isn't it? If you don't want to be a complete loser, then you need to be optimising your workplace, your time, your social life, your holidays, your health, your nutrition, and everything else you care about. But this quest for optimisation is a trap, my friend. It's not the fix you think it is. In fact, the sort of optimisation you're after doesn't even make sense, and thinking otherwise is making you miserable. Settle in for a sub-optimal explanation of why you should forget about optimisation, and what you should be doing instead.
Find the Wheel of Life exercise here.
References:
Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend, 'The efficiency trap: why optimising everything can backfire, badly', The Guardian, 8th November 2026.
Catherine Houlihan, 'Optimising is just perfectionism in disguise. Here’s why that’s a problem', The Conversation, 16th October 2025.
Episode transcript:
Trying to optimise? You might want to rethink that.
Welcome to The Academic Imperfectionist podcast. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, Associate Professor in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, and coach. In this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hey friends! What do you think of my new theme tune? It was created by my incredibly talented son, Owly, who’s 15. Just over a year ago he started learning to play the guitar. I offered to get him lessons, but he didn’t want them. He wanted to find his own way. To ‘flourish on his own terms’, to quote .. well, me, in my intro. He really threw himself into it, learning to play things by some of the bands he enjoys and also composing his own stuff, and he’s impressively good. I used to learn the guitar too, when I was his age, and I had lessons, but I never got very good. I was initially inspired to learn by the punk music that I loved at the time, but disappointingly, when I arrived in a local music shop dressed in a Sid Vicious shirt and accompanied by my parents, I got fobbed off with an acoustic guitar that I could only ever manage to get a half-decent sound out of if I painfully cheesewired my fingers with the strings. A few months ago I discovered that my father had kept hold of that guitar - which I’d assumed was long gone - and he gave it to Owly. Owly was delighted by what he referred to as this ‘vintage 1990 acoustic guitar’ - a description that makes me feel pretty vintage myself. He tinkered with it so he could play it without losing his fingers. Anyway, great job with the intro music, Owly. His brief was ‘kind of punky, but upbeat’. I guess I’m still not much of an acoustic guitar sort of person.
Before we move on, let’s take a moment to pay tribute to the also kind of punky but upbeat outgoing theme music, shall we? I don’t even know who composed it, and I can’t find any information about it online. I got it from a royalty-free music website when I was first putting together the podcast. It’s called ‘Dirty Little Synth’, and if you’re thinking, ‘Hang on, there’s no synth in it, dirty or otherwise’, that’s because I used the version without the synth. Just the dirt, then. Thank you, unknown composer, for your years of service, and I hope you’ve gone on to make lots of punky but upbeat music that has paid you royalties.
Ok. On with business. I’ve been thinking about optimisation. Bit of a buzzword, that, isn’t it? In all sorts of areas. Optimising our efficiency at work. Optimising our free time. Optimising ourselves - our health, fitness, mindset, nutrition, sleep. Optimising other things, too. Student satisfaction scores. Student recruitment. The energy efficiency of your car. The bang for your buck of your charity donations. The amount of cats you can adopt without your home descending into primal feline chaos. Just me, that last one, is it? All this optimisation talk - and, increasingly, it seems to be everywhere - makes me a bit uncomfortable. It’s a deceptively friendly-sounding form of perfectionism. I mean, we all know - at least, I hope we do, and if you don’t, here comes the newsflash - that perfection is unachievable, so don’t even bother trying. But optimisation - I mean, that’s not about aiming at perfection, right? By definition, it’s about making things as good as they can possibly, realistically be in this flawed world. What’s the problem? You can embrace imperfectionism but still be into optimisation. And who wouldn’t be into optimisation? What’s wrong with optimal? Why would anyone want things to be less good than they can make them? I’ve been thinking about this - and discussing it in coaching sessions, in various guises - for a while, and then this week I read an article in the Guardian by Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend entitled ‘The efficiency trap: why optimising everything can backfire, badly’. That article, which I’ll put a link to in the episode notes, was about the dangers of optimising things other than ourselves - hospitals, traffic flow, financial markets - but it got me thinking that it’s time to get some of my own thoughts on optimisation in order.
Now, a lot of the time, optimisation sounds very sensible. If you can optimise your chance of getting that job you want to apply for by, say, having someone with insight into your field look over your application and give you some feedback, then that just seems like a sensible thing to do, right? If you can optimise your recovery from illness by following the advice your doctor has just given you, go for it - it would be bonkers not to. If you can optimise the chance of not getting run over when you cross the street by paying attention to what’s going on around you, then of course you should do that, and it would be bizarre to suggest otherwise. I agree that all of these things are sensible and that - unless something weird is going on - you should do them if you find yourself in those situations. But the reason they’re sensible is not because they’re examples of optimisation. They’re just things you can do to improve an outcome you care about. Optimisation is something more than that. Optimisation is about not merely improving outcomes, but optimising them. And - here comes the first puzzle I want to raise about this - it’s not even clear what that means. Take the job application example. Getting some insightful feedback on your application is a good idea, if you have the opportunity, because there’s good reason to think it can help you improve your chances of success with the application. But does it optimise those chances? In other words, does it make them as good as they can possibly be? I mean … probably not, because there are likely more things you could do in order to improve your chances further. Bribe the interview panel. Murder all the other actual or likely candidates. Fill your CV with impressive lies about yourself. Oh, you want to avoid unethical things? Ok, then. How about: take out an extra mortgage on your house and use the money to make a substantial donation to the institution you want to be employed by. Send your kids to boarding school so that they aren’t around to distract you from your work. Stop seeing your friends, too, while you’re at it. Stop doing any work that interests you, and instead focus solely on the things that are going to make you an attractive job candidate. Offer to do the job for half the advertised salary. What’s that? You’re not interested in optimisation at any cost - just a sort of ‘within reason’ optimisation? Well, that’s the problem I’m getting at. There’s this question of what it is we’re trying to optimise, and how much we’re willing to invest in doing so, given the other things we value. So, if you want to optimise your chances of getting this job but you also want to be a good parent, what does that imply about the choices you ought to be making? And, what are the conditions under which optimising your chances for this job is something that you care about doing? For example, getting a bit of insightful feedback on your application is sensible and harmless, but agreeing to accept a pay cut might (but then again, might not, it all depends) undermine the value you’re placing on getting the job. Considerations like these make the language of optimisation start to seem meaningless. If optimisation means ‘doing an optimal job of this thing given that it’s just one of several important projects’, and ‘being allowed to tweak these factors but not those ones in the quest for optimisation’ - then it’s not clear what that would even look like. How would we know it when we see it? How do you know whether things really are sub-optimal, or whether they’re optimal given the massively complex calculation required in order to spend all available time and energy in exactly the right places? It all reminds me of something that the 17th-century German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, used to claim: that the world we live in is the best of all possible worlds. This claim was Leibniz’s answer to the Problem of Evil, which is the difficulty of explaining how evil can coexist with an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. According to Leibniz, sure, it’s a shame that we have things like malaria and paedophiles and earthquakes, but any world that didn’t have those things would have even worse things in it, because it’s all about balance and you can’t have it all. Was Leibniz right about this? Nobody knows, because fact-checking him would involve agreeing on a way of identifying, quantifying, and comparing evil things, and then calculating the precise repercussions of tinkering with the level of evil in the world, which nobody has the time or the information or the cognitive power or the inclination to do - except, perhaps, the sort of omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God whose possibility we’re arguing about in the first place.
So: if you care about improving outcomes in areas of your life that are important to you, great, go right ahead. But optimisation? Chances are, if you think it makes sense, you haven’t thought about it enough. So, why all the talk about optimisation? One reason, I think, is that it’s plain old perfectionism in disguise, and not even a very convincing disguise. I mentioned earlier that optimisation isn’t actually perfectionism, strictly speaking. But, in practice, it pretty much is. Unlike the idea of ‘improving outcomes’, optimisation (like perfectionism) is binary. Either something is optimised or it’s not, and if you’re someone who thinks they ought to be optimising, then it’s a small step to believing that unless you’re optimising, you’ve failed. The nuance is lost, just as it’s lost in perfectionism. The psychologist Catherine Hoolihan wrote an article in The Conversation comparing optimisation to perfectionism, where she has more to say that I haven’t said here - I’ll link to that in the episode notes too. The idea of optimisation is especially dangerous, I think, because it has an air of respectability that perfectionism doesn’t. If you go around telling people that you want things to be perfect, you can expect an ‘aw, bless’ type reaction - a pat on the head, a rueful ‘don’t we all’. You know, deep down, that what you’re wanting is not achievable. At least, I hope you do. But if you say you want things to be optimal, then .. well, roll up your sleeves, crack open the whiteboard markers, and get drawing some flow charts, because with the right sort of can-do attitude, you can strategise your way to success here. Maybe you can, if you’re talking about optimising a very limited and confined domain - how to spend the X number of working hours that remain before the deadline as productively as possible, for example - but if you’re interested in the sort of fix-my-life optimisation that I know a lot of you are, there’s no chance. Or, more specifically, the language of optimisation gives you nothing that the more pedestrian and less misleading language of ‘improving outcomes’ doesn’t.
Why do you even care about optimisation, anyway? This is something I’ve thought a bit about. In particular, I’ve been thinking about why academics in particular care about optimisation. Because, despite the nerdy, scientific-seeming, doing-calculations aspect of it, which is appealing to a lot of us, it’s a puzzling that it appeals to academics. For all its flaws, an important benefit of working in academia is the autonomy we have over how we spend much of our time. It’s very common to hear academics say that they would struggle in a different sort of workplace, where they are closely managed. Why, then, would these autonomous and free-spirited people embrace something like optimisation, with all the rules it implies about what you should be doing and how much and when in and in what way? Why would any of us want to swap being micromanaged by a human for being micromanaged by a concept? Well, who knows, but from what I’ve seen in coaching sessions, the freedom that academics enjoy brings with it a lot of anxiety for some people about whether they’re spending their time appropriately. They wouldn’t want a manager breathing down their neck, but that’s not to say that they wouldn’t gain some peace of mind from having someone in authority there at the end of the day saying, ‘That’s enough for today, go home’. Optimisation appeals because it provides structure and boundaries. A ‘right’ way of doing things. Permission to go home. In reality, it doesn’t actually provide any of that, for the reasons I’ve mentioned - there are far better ways to get some structure, if that’s what you need, and a lot of us apparently do need that. What I find interesting, though, is that although I’ve had a lot of clients who have, in various ways, expressed the belief that they ought to be ‘optimising’, they do it in a wide variety of different ways. Some think they ought to be optimising by spending more time doing their research. Some think they should be spending less time working in order to focus on other areas of life. Some think they should be more intentional and strategic in their work, or in other areas of life. Very different visions of what life should be, but all united by a sense that they are not currently enough, and that things would be better if only they were, in some sense, more. Committing to optimise, though, is not a route to peace of mind, especially for anyone with anxieties around not being enough. It doesn’t bring clarity around boundaries and structure, either. It doesn’t give you the ‘this is what you ought to be doing right now’ recipe you’re looking for, which you’re only looking for in the first place because you’re worried that you might be messing up without realising, and that by the time you do realise it might be too late to fix anything, but of course you don’t have any reason to believe seriously that any of these worries are likely to materialise. Life happens - peace happens, if you’re lucky - when you stop trying to optimise and think instead about how to do a passable job with the resources you have available at the time, and when you accept that there is rarely just one correct way to do things. Or, better still, when you learn to enjoy the moment - to relax on a day off, for example, without worrying about whether you could be doing something even more enjoyable. I know this might be shocking news for you, but you don’t actually have to be improving all the time. It doesn’t need to be your default state. For those moments when it does make sense to think about how to improve - when you’re set on making a targeted effort to get a promotion, or when you’re generally dissatisfied and you’re trying to work out why and what you can do about it - forget about optimisation and think instead about improving outcomes, or improving things in certain areas of life. You might find the Wheel of Life exercise useful here - I have a template you can download on the Resources page of my website, and I’ll stick the link in the episode notes.
That’s all from me this time. I wish you a sub-optimal but nevertheless very enjoyable and satisfying weekend, and I’ll catch you next time.
The Academic Imperfectionist podcast is researched, written, produced, and presented by me, Rebecca Roache. The original music was composed and performed by Owly Roache. If you enjoy the podcast, please do subscribe on whatever podcast app you use, so you never miss an episode. I want to help as many people as possible escape the miserable grip of perfectionism and live flourishing, satisfying lives, and I would really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with anyone who you think might find it useful, and if you’d take a moment to rate and review the podcast on your app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line via the contact form on my website, where you’ll also find a form you can use to recommend guests who you’d like to see interviewed on the podcast. You can find The Academic Imperfectionist, sporadically, on Bluesky, Facebook, and Medium. Thanks for listening!
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