The Optimisation Trap

In September 2024, I woke up one morning and decided I was going to change my life.

In September 2024, I woke up one morning and decided I was going to change my life.

Not slowly, and not one thing at a time. Everything… all at once.

I wrote a long list. Wake up every day at 6am. Get in 10,000 steps a day. Eat whole foods only. Keep to a calorie deficit. Visit the gym 3 times a week. Do pilates 3 times a week. Get 8 hours of sleep a night. Read every evening and journal every morning. Drink at least 2 litres of water a day. See friends at least 2 times a week.

And that was just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head.

I also had about ten different habit tracking apps on my phone at the time, which probably tells you everything you need to know.

A few months before, I’d made one of the hardest and most emotional decisions I’d ever made in my career. I’d downsized our team from six people to two, and handed back the keys to our waterfront office in Liverpool City Centre - an office I had worked so hard for and was proud of.

It had been a really difficult few months so when September came around and things finally felt a little calmer, did I rest? Did I take a breath? Did I give myself even 5 minutes to exist without a plan?

No, obviously not.

Instead, I listened to every business and self-improvement podcast I could find and told myself that what I really needed was a complete life overhaul.

Looking back now, it’s painfully obvious what was actually going on… I wasn’t optimising because I was thriving and enjoying myself, I was optimising because I felt like a total failure. And I genuinely believed that if I could just build the perfect routine and tick every box, I’d stop feeling like one.

We live in a world obsessed with optimisation

There is something deeply appealing about the idea that if you just find the right system, the right routine, the right combination of habits - everything will click into place. You’ll be productive and healthy and calm and successful and well-rested and present - all at the same time. It sounds great… right? Sign me up!

But somewhere along the way, optimisation stopped being about doing your best work and started being about optimising everything.

It’s not just about getting enough sleep anymore… you need to track your sleep stages, optimise your sleep score, avoid screens an hour before bed, take magnesium and keep your room at the right temperature (apparently it’s 16°c… which is freezing FYI)

It’s not enough to eat well… you need to track your macros, only eat whole foods, maximise your protein intake, make sure you’re getting enough fibre, iron and whatever other supplement is being pushed down our necks this month.

Rest is no longer just rest. It’s labelled recovery.

Socialising? There are people out there who will genuinely tell you to audit your friendships checking whether people are adding or taking away from your personal growth, and I wish I was making that up.

It’s a lot. And if you’re ambitious (like me) and you care about your career, business, and your output - the noise can be even louder. There’s always another morning routine to try, another productivity tool to try or another book about habits to read.

I was consuming it all, and it was constant. And rather than making me feel more capable and in control, it made me feel like I was behind on becoming the best version of myself.

Which, now I think about it, might just be the point.

Because what this new optimisation culture doesn’t tell you is that there is no finish line, no final destination. The whole thing is built on the premise that you are always improvable. There is always a slightly better version of yourself that you’re away from being enough. And especially for women, that message lands very differently.

Why ambitious women fall the hardest

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

When I look back at September 2024 me, drowning in habit trackers and non-negotiable 6am alarms, I don’t see someone who was lazy or naive or easily influenced. I just see someone who was really really desperate to solve problems by working harder.

And that didn’t come from nowhere.

From a young age, a lot of us are taught that effort is the answer. Work harder and stay later. Be more prepared and care more. And for a long time, that belief serves us really well. It helps get good results in school, allows us to land the jobs we go for, and builds us opportunities at our front door.

But it also teaches us that the gap between where we are and where we want to be is always a personal effort problem. That if things aren’t going well, we just need to try harder and optimise better.

So when the self-improvement world showed up with its systems and apps, we didn’t see it for what it was. We just thought that it makes sense… it’s just another area to apply more effort and get better results… right? That makes sense, we can do that.

The problem is that this time, the thing we’re trying to apply effort to was ourselves.

Not a specific project or a business goal. Ourselves.

Our sleep, our bodies, our friends, our mornings and our minds (just to name a few!)

And because we’re so used to treating effort as the solution, we didn’t stop to ask whether the problem we’re solving was even real.

I didn’t need 10 new habit tracking apps, what I really needed was a few months to recover from a hard period in my business and give myself some time to process everything. But that isn’t typically something ambitious women are well-practiced at. We’re so much more comfortable with action.

I think that’s why the optimisation trap hits us so hard, it’s not a weakness… to be honest it’s the drive and determination that makes us good at what we do, just pointed inward, with no clear goal or finish line - fuelled by the belief that we’re still not quite good enough yet.

Which is absolute nonsense. But it is very convincing nonsense when you’re 3 podcasts deep on a Tuesday morning and haven’t ticked half of your habit tracker off by 9am.

This isn’t an argument against hardwork

I want to be really clear about something before I go any further.

I believe in hard work. Genuinely. Not the hustle-culture, sleep-is-for-the-weak kind of way, but in the unglamourous, show-up-consistently kind of way. I think effort matters, I know discipline matters and as someone who has always had to work for everything, I get that building good habits matters too.

And I say that as someone who has actually done it. Over the last 2 years, I’ve slowly built a routine that works for me but it’s not been overnight. It’s been a gradual process, one step at a time, adding things that have felt right and getting rid of what didn’t. And those habits are now just… part of my life. They’re not a to-do list item that I fail at every day, they’re just what I do.

So this isn’t me telling you to throw out your current routine and eat snacks on the couch in the name of self-acceptance, that’s not the point.

The point is the reason behind it.

Because there is a version of building good habits that comes from a place of genuine ambition and of wanting to feel good, do good work and show up for the things and people that you care about. That version feels great and actually adds to your life. Plus, it’s sustainable because it’s actually yours.

And then there’s the other version.

The version that comes from feeling like you’re behind, needing to prove something, that comes from the belief that the current version of you is a problem that needs solving. That version doesn’t feel good. It feels like a treadmill that never ends, no matter how fast you go or how many boxes you tick, you never quite feel like you’ve done enough.

What’s funny is that the habits can look the same from the outside. The same 6am alarm (or maybe 7am, if I’m treating myself), the same gym session, the same journaling format. But one of them is building something and the other just running from something.

And I think if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us know which one we’re doing.

I know, I just didn’t want to admit it.

Because admitting that my September 2024 overhaul wasn’t really about becoming my best self, it was about feeling like a failure and desperately trying to outrun that feeling, rather than actually dealing with it… and that felt much harder than just downloading another app.

The mindset shift

By December 2024, I was sooooo done.

I wasn’t at rock bottom by any means, I was just done in the way of ticking things off my to-do list, I genuinely couldn’t be bothered anymore.

So I stopped and went cold turkey.

For a few weeks, I did very little. I didn’t track anything. I didn’t optimise anything, I just got through December like a normal human being, which mostly involved eating my bodyweight in festive food and watching a lot of TV.

And then something shifted.

I started thinking about what I actually wanted. Not what influencers or podcasts said I should want. Not what the habit trackers were telling me I needed. What I, Olivia, genuinely wanted to feel like and build into my life. And when I asked myself that question honestly, the list looked very different.

I didn’t want the perfect morning routine, I wanted to feel good in my body. I didn’t want to hit 10,000 steps every day without fail. I wanted to move more because it made me feel better. I didn’t want to journal because I felt like I should, I wanted to actually reflect and process things properly.

So, I started small. One thing at a time. No specific tracker or streak this time.

And slowly, over the last nearly 2 years, those things have just become part of how I live. I’ve built things gradually, kept it imperfect and adjusted when life got in the way (which it always does!)

There are still days I don’t do everything and that would send old me into a complete coma. But current me is mostly fine with it, because I know that missing a day doesn’t undo anything. Consistency was never about being perfect, it was about coming back again and again.

And that realisation alone was worth more than any habit tracker I ever downloaded.

So where does that leave you?

I’m not going to tell you to delete your habit tracker or throw out your morning routine. If it’s working for you, genuinely, then keep it.

But I do think it’s worth asking yourself a few honest questions every now and then about why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Are the habits you’re building actually yours… or did you inherit them because you felt like you should?

Does your routine feel like something you’ve chosen or a list you’re waiting to tick off everyday?

When you miss a day, how do you feel? Ready to pick it back up tomorrow or like you’ve completely undone everything?

And possibly the most important one - are you optimising because you’re curious about what you’re capable of or because a part of you still believes that the current version of you isn’t quite good enough yet?

There is no right or wrong answer here, I’ve been on both sides of those questions at some point. But I think there’s something super valuable in just being honest with yourself about where you are right now.

Because you are not a system to be optimised.

Hard work matters. Consistency matters. Building habits that make you feel good matters too. I’m not here to tell you otherwise.

But you are allowed to build a good life and also have parts of it that are wonderfully unoptimised (idk if that’s even a word?).

You can have dinner with a friend that isn’t intentional… it’s just dinner.

You can go on a walk that isn’t just so you can hit your step count… it’s just a walk.

You can have a Sunday that isn’t productive or even restorative… it’s just a Sunday.

Ambition doesn’t require you to turn yourself into a project.

And some days, the best thing you can do is close the app, put your phone down and just live your life without measuring any of it.