I read the title, felt seen, and immediately opened a new note called 'plan for optimising less'. I think I'm the target audience.

There's a version of this for every hobby. I have a friend who stopped enjoying running the week he bought a watch that gives him a recovery score.

The watch knows he hasn't recovered. The watch does not know he was having a nice time.

Goodhart's law, applied to one person: once the sleep score becomes the goal, you start sleeping for the score. I know people who lie awake worrying about what their tracker will say in the morning.

I'm a little wary of the anti-optimisation genre too. Some optimising is just competence. Learning three fast dinners, or setting up bills to pay themselves, frees attention for the things you actually care about. The trouble starts when the optimising becomes the hobby.

That's roughly where I've ended up. Automate the boring things once, then stop tinkering with the automation.