For the last 10-20 years, we've been obsessed with optimizing everything. Optimize your website, optimize your sleep, optimize your diet, your morning routine, and we have to track it, measure it, wear something on our wrist that tells us about it, improve it. Get more apps that do more things and tell us more about what we're doing. No one embodied this more than Tim Ferriss, the man behind The 4-Hour Workweek. He has actually come out and walked it back a little bit, though. I'll tell you what he is now saying right after this.

At some point, optimization crosses a line. Instead of improving your life, it becomes your life. You are no longer living; you are managing several different apps. The lesson is simple but important. Tools are supposed to support you, not consume you and become your entire life.