How I Applied Efficienism to my Full-Time Job

Do you have a full-time job? If so, you work 2,080 hours in a typical work year. As an efficienist I took a look at this number, it is a big portion of my life after all, in fact over two and a half months per year.

So what could I do to optimize it? I certainly can’t stop working because of obvious reasons, so that’s out of the question. Naturally, I didn’t know how to go about it. The best thing to do was actually to take a look at the Efficienism Elements and see if I found anything relevant in there that I could apply to my job. I am a Software Engineer by profession, so a lot of my time is spent in front of a computer screen, writing code.

A Tip

Instead of just reading this like any other article or blog post, I encourage you to apply the same analysis I did for your job and your situation. We are all different after all.

The Analysis

Here’s the list of Efficienism Elements that I found to be relevant to my job

• Unrecoverable Resources
• Compounding Principle

One of the Unrecoverable Resources is time, I am unfortunately unable to work less but thankfully, I am able to work remotely, all I need after all is a computer screen. This is a huge time saver. I have an in-depth article about commute with a handy calculator.

The other resource is of course health, this is a major problem for many people with office jobs that require sitting on a desk for 8 hours. This is also compounding principle because if you sit on a bad chair for one day you’ll be just fine, but day after day over a long period of time you will begin to notice the bad effects of a bad chair.

Back to my situation, not only I questioned my chair, I looked at the desk, monitor, mouse as well as using a tool to force me to take breaks. Here’s a nice breakdown of each of the times

Chair

I always hit my legs against the arms rests, actually I never used them to begin with… so I ended up getting a desk chair with no arm rests. My legs don’t hurt anymore!

Automatic Standing desk

Totally worth the investment, a standing desk really helped me with my lower back pain that I was having for a while, Also my knees hurt less. Wow, I didn’t even know I had so much pain, to begin with.

Mouse

This is tough, I do have wrist pain but at the time of writing this I am still unable to find a good mouse that reduces the strain on my hand. I have tried a trackpad, a vertical mouse, I track ball, you name it.

Monitor

I have bad eyesight so I got a bigger monitor and changed my settings to increase the text size. I don’t have to lean forward all the time to see the text and this helps me maintain a better posture during work

Tools

I sometimes forget to take breaks, like drinking water or just remembering to switch from sitting to standing mode. I currently use an app that reminders at a 25 min interval to take a rest, I use this to rest my eyes, walk around my room or get myself water. Here’s a google search link to find the right app for you: app to take a break at work

Additionally, my work laptop gets very hot especially in the summer, I am not sure if this has any negative health impact on my hands but I try to use an external keyboard when possible and I also installed an app that controls my computer fan speed to lower it’s temperature . Google search: app to control laptop fan speed

Outcome

Combining all the points above, I think I managed to prevent my health from deteriorating as much as it would have before I applied the changes. I consider this a success!

NOTE: To avoid redundancy, saving time on commute was not mentioned because it already has a dedicated article.

As usual, let’s resort to Laura, she’s always a great case study that helps us put things into perspective

Efficienist Laura with an office job

• Standing desk —> reduced lower back and knee pain
• Good Desk Chair with no arm rests -> no more leg pain
• Comfortable Monitor and viewing setup -> improved neck pain
• Automated reminder tool to take a break -> frequent breaks

Take all the points above and apply the Compounding Principle and you will see how this will have a very big impact over time.

Conclusion

This is not meant to be taken AS IS, the conclusion here is that you should take a look at your job and how you do it and apply the Efficienism Elements of Efficienism to it. Your future self will be grateful to you for doing this