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Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to The Doug Show. I’m Doug Cunnington, and today we’re gonna talk about over-optimizing. I’ll go over a few specific points and hopefully something, uh, helpful, maybe at least one helpful thing for today.
Semi Retired Creator Life
I’m in a different phase these days, so I’ve sort of downshifted. I’m roughly, uh, semi-retired. I work on some of these creative projects on YouTube and podcasting primarily, and I’m a, you know, a hobbyist, a hobbyist in the music area, and it’s, it’s fun, but I have no… I, I’m not trying to make money from it in any capacity.
So it’s purely a fun outlet for me. All, all that said, I’m really focused more on leisure and doing things that perhaps don’t actually look productive from the outside. In fact, it may look like I just, uh, walk around and, uh, I’m living a life of leisure, which is, uh, highly– I mean, it’s quite accurate. I do have a, a reasonable, um, high output of, uh, content and creative material, but it’s through, I guess, many years of experience and that kind of thing.
Camp FI and Monetization
I was at a small retreat a couple, uh, weeks ago, and I recorded a live podcast there. It’s a retreat called, uh, Camp FI, and it’s about financial independence. It’s not actually like a camp. It’s just at a retreat center and, you know, there’s like a cafeteria and there’s, uh, kind of a dorm setup kind of thing.
So you’re not actually camping outside, it’s just the, the way that they described it. But anyway, the point is I recorded a live podcast there and people know that I have a podcast or two and a few people, not a ton, but a few people that were also somewhat in the creator space that were like, “Oh, how do you monetize?”
And I was like, “Extremely poorly now.” I basically don’t monetize. In fact, this show is not monetized at all and there’s no ads on YouTube. There’s no ads that I run, um, which I’ll give a caveat at the end maybe if I remember, but it’s, it’s basically this doesn’t earn any money. The other show I do have Buy Me A Coffee, but it’s making maybe like 10% of what it could make if I had actual advertisers out there, about $300 per month.
So that’s what I’m getting from you know, I think it’s 56 supporters. So it’s only, I mean, it averages to just around $6 on average. So most people do about $5. There’s a few people that give a little bit more. So anyway, I’m doing a bunch of stuff that generally looks unproductive or the output is very low income.
And the thing is, I do realize that’s roughly unrelatable. People have to spend their time on things that earn money. They have to work.
Productivity Obsession Origins
And I was in that very kind of hustly phase, not quite for a decade, but almost a decade. And I became obsessed, like many people, with productivity and optimizing and, you know, better systems, using better templates, continuous improvement.
It was all part of my fucking shtick, you know? I mean, like, that’s what I was doing. I was like, I’m taking these project management ideas and, like, let’s apply it to some online business where maybe some of the rigor of the corporate world didn’t trickle over for, you know, people doing solo entrepreneurship or side hustles or something like that.
So it actually, I mean, it worked pretty well. And the thing is, it’s fun to try to make things more efficient. And if you’re looking at it from a system perspective, you’re like, oh, if we can improve the, you know, the process by a small percentage, we’ll have this sort of flywheel thing where we’re able to produce even more with the same or less effort, blah, blah, blah.
And this creeps in, this kind of efficiency optimization stuff creeps in anywhere that you can observe metrics, especially easily or analytics. And this comes into play with, obviously, like working online. There’s tons of data from, you know, back in the day looking at, you know, Google Analytics, looking at all the different ways you can slice and dice the data.
Early years, you could see, like, what keywords brought in traffic to your site and to what page and for how long. And you could even, I mean, I did this. I would set up, I guess it was funneled type analytics so I could see, like, where someone came in and then what percentage of people from various traffic sources actually converted over.
So that would tell you that you should spend more time on those traffic sources if they converted better or maybe it was cheaper to get leads into a certain area. So anyway I still like that kind of stuff. I mean, it’s looking at analytics and optimizing.
Metrics and Fun Balance
But anyway, so these days, like YouTube has a ton of analytics, obviously social media, even if you are not a business user, you see all this data about, you know, how many people saw your Instagram reel or whatever it happens to be, how many people like commented, how many liked it, on and on and on.
So there’s all these metrics. We see it on our phones, we have it on our watches, and in some ways, like I use my watch mostly for like fitness tracking stuff, and I was like, “Is this healthy? Should I not look so closely on my watch here?” And then it didn’t have my, uh, I didn’t have a, uh, Apple Watch for a little while, and then, uh, I wasn’t getting as many steps by a fairly significant amount, and I was like, “Oh, actually, it’s good for me to obsess slightly, not a ton, but just to be a little bit more active and move around a little bit more.”
So it can help in some ways. All that to say, I don’t really care about the analytics as much, especially on these hobby areas. If I start caring too much, it definitely would be not fun, and I would quit. I also look at the analytics, and I have referenced all this year that the YouTube views are down quite a bit on the channel.
However, on the audio side, it’s pretty stable. Uh, there’s spikes and, and jumps, and every now and then, uh, people go travel for the summer, they listen to podcasts less, whatever. Um, like you can kind of see that on a seasonal basis on the audio side. But I look at the analytics, and still when I’m seeing, uh, you know, fewer views on YouTube, I’m like, “Can I tweak something a little bit just to make the numbers go up?”
And I kn- I get out of my way, and I’m like, “Oh, don’t worry about it. Just do the thing that you’re gonna do. Like, don’t make it not fun.” It’s very easy to make it not fun if you go down that route.
Eight Over Optimizing Traps
So in this episode, we’re gonna look at some practical tips, and really from the productivity standpoint in, you know, kind of delivering projects, completing projects, and I’ll hopefully lean on my project management background.
And if you don’t know, I have a PMP, the Project Management Professional certification that I got way back in 2008 when it was a little bit more rare. But I, I keep it active even though I won’t ever, um, get a corporate job again unless something really dramatic, um, goes wrong. So we’ll talk about why this over-optimizing– And the key, I mean, like optimizing, cool.
Over-optimizing, like right in the definition, like it’s too much. You’ve exceeded the usefulness of whatever it is you’re working on. So I don’t know if we’ll hit all of these. Yeah, I’ll go fast. We have eight things here. Some of them flow seamlessly into the next, where there’s a little bit of overlap.
Number one, there’s usually not a perfect solution or answer. There’s only trade-offs, which will come up again and again. Switching tools for a better workflow. Again, there’s only trade-offs, so I’ll be specific when we get to that section. Number three, you can apply this almost anywhere. Simple is always better No caveats on that one.
Number four is analysis paralysis. Number five, the good enough principle, which is around satisficing and avoiding maximizing. Number six, the paradox of choice. Number seven, the cost of maintenance. And number eight, opportunity cost. So we’ll get into those, and I’ll have to be fast.
AI Outline Fail and Gear
A couple quick notes. I numbered these because I actually wrote this.
At first, you know, I’ve been covering, uh, the issues with AI, the pushback on AI. I’ll hopefully have the interview with Paul, um, Lipsky coming up pretty soon. I saw him at, um, a gathering in person, so I was like: Hey, man, we should record. He was like: Yeah, yeah, totally down. So I should be able to schedule it, and it probably will come out in a couple weeks.
But I was sitting down ’cause I was thinking about AI, and I’m like, okay, I wanna do a video on, like, what I use AI for and, like, what’s useful and what’s not. And I was like, all right, let’s… I have a l- a light idea about what this episode could be. I was like: Hey, I do this podcast, “The Doug Show,” are you familiar with it?
This is in Gemini AI. Are you familiar with “The Doug Show”? And I need, uh, an outline for an episode roughly around over-optimizing. I wanna cover a couple elements, and can you give me an outline on it? I wanna lean on the project management background. I ended up with a, a mess. I didn’t save it. I, I probably could look back at the, the chat.
But overall, it was a piece of shit, and I was like, “This is not good. There’s nowhere for me to go.” It definitely felt, um, fluffy and redundant and not at all like my voice. And I know the people out there, you’re like, “Oh, we have to train your AI, and you have to make sure that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Yeah. I, I mean, I’ve, I’ve done some of that stuff, but I… Not to the degree in which some people have mentioned. Um, but it turns out if you just write your own shit, um, it, it’s not too bad. So I’ve been– I have a few pages I’ve written in notebooks over the last little bit, so I, I feel pretty good about it.
I had, uh, some additional creativity, and I was like, “This, this is pretty good.” The other quick note, uh, thanks all the folks that mentioned the, uh, the warmth and nice sound from the Warm Audio two fifty-one microphone that I used last week. I wanted to use it more, and I probably will, but it is an… It’s a very sensitive mic, so I basically have to make sure no one else is in the house because it’ll pick up the mouse fart, uh, across the room.
And if, uh, Elizabeth or, uh, Georgie’s, uh, f-fine to just sit down here or whatever, but Elizabeth, if she’s walking around or she’s doing stuff, it will pick up those noises very, very, um, apparently. So I was like, “Okay, I don’t wanna try to use it.” And the thing is, uh, it’s been very hot, and, um, Elizabeth hasn’t been going out as much.
She’s been staying in. I mean, it’s been like 100 degrees, so normally she’d be like, “I’m gonna go walk around for a couple hours outside or go do something or whatever, meet up with a friend to go walk around.” But because it’s so hot, that has not been happening, so there’s, uh, there’s precious l-little time where there’s no one else in here.
Sometimes I try to play the guitar. I’m looking at a couple of my amps over there. I’m like, I try to turn up the amps. So I can’t do everything at all, all times, and hopefully I’ll bust out the microphone. So I’m using the, uh, Shure MV7, but I did get the Color Box, uh, version two, the JHS pedal that I’ve referenced before.
And what I did to actually use AI to, to tie things together, I was like, “AI didn’t work well for the outline on this show. I, I wrote it myself.” And then I gave it a try, like, “Hey, I have the Color Box. I, I wanna use the equalizer settings and, and all this stuff here to hopefully get closer to the sound of the Warm Audio two fifty-one.”
So it gave some tips about that, which I haven’t listened back, but when I looked at it and I looked at the logic, I was like, “Okay, this actually makes some sense. I’ll give it a shot.” And I think it sounds better than when I was using the Warm… Or sorry, it works better than when I was using the Color Box before, ’cause I think I had the settings a little too…
It was burying the treble, and I was chasing s-some other different sound, and it ended up, people told me I sounded like I was under a blanket kind of thing. So this should have a little bit more sparkle on the top end. So let’s get to the topic for today.
Trade Offs Not Perfection
There’s usually not a perfect solution or answer.
There’s only trade-offs. So– And I, I think when you step back and you think about it from a little bit higher level, ’cause you may be thinking obviously, like if you need to… I’m g-gonna just make up some example. If you need to have like some sort of cloud storage, you could probably look and see there’s, uh, Google Drive, Dropbox, some Microsoft Office situation, and you could figure out like, “Oh, this one works for me because i-it’s cheap and fast,” something like that.
But maybe you, you realize there’s a few other criteria that you have to look at, and then you, you do arrive at, okay, these are, um, these are great solutions. Maybe you find, again, I’m making this up, but maybe you find there is a solution that is like, it’s faster, it’s like way faster. Maybe the data center is much closer to your house, and you’re able to store and retrieve data much more quickly.
However, the downside, right, is that it costs three times as much ’cause it’s, you know, ten times faster. So perfect example of a trade-off. You can have a faster download and upload speed, but it’s gonna cost you. There’s no real free rides. And from a maybe content production standpoint Back in the day, we used to write blog posts.
Maybe now it’s a substack or something like that. Maybe it’s a social media post and you have like long form shit that you publish on Instagram or whatever. Maybe it’s a video. And the thing is like you probably c- you can improve that piece of content over and over and iterate on it and maybe with like a YouTube video, video or a video edit, you’re able to come back to it the next day, improve the pacing a little bit.
Maybe you can improve, um, some of the edits so it’s a little bit smoother and you can kind of keep making it better for a very long time. Maybe you have, you know, a couple months of editing on this masterpiece YouTube video. But the thing is, it’s costing you time. So there really are no trade-offs. Even if you can, um, continue to improve something, there’s some point of like diminishing returns and there’s not a perfect solution.
You could probably just try to find something that is good enough, which is, um, number five, which we’ll come to pretty soon. But don’t think that there’s some perfect solution for what you’re looking for. That said, especially in the, um, I guess productivity, uh, porn area that we were– I was m- more involved in back in the day, I’m sure I have videos like this where it’s like, “Oh, here’s my, uh, foolproof system to manage blah, blah, blah super fast.”
Tool Switching Overhead
And I– eventually I was like, “You know what? A lot of this shit doesn’t matter,” because I ended up like moving tools a few times and sometimes it’s, you know, there’s not much overhead, but sometimes there are. And I remember, um, I just had a flash of this tool called Workflowy, and essentially it was like a, a, uh, nested outlining piece of software.
Very simple. I think you could probably create it in a few minutes with one of the LLMs or encoding, uh, solutions out there. Super simple and actually wrote a lot of my course, uh, material and other long form content using Workflowy. It, it has a great way of Sort of segmenting the information, and it kept me from getting distracted.
That said, I probably could have just used like Notepad or whatever and would have been just fine. But the thing is, if you’re on YouTube and you’re, you’re watching, um, you know, suggested video after suggested video, and I don’t– honestly, I don’t even know if Notion’s super popular anymore, ’cause by the time everybody had a boner for Notion, I was kind of tapping out, and I was like, I don’t…
Like, I’m not a hundred percent sure what, um, it does, but I’m sure it’s not a brand-new thing. Maybe it’s putting a couple tools together. I’m totally ignorant about it, by the way. So maybe Notion’s still a huge fucking deal, um, and tons of people use it. I suspect probably so. But I remember a few years beforehand, people were like, “Evernote, it will change your life.”
Like, you could just keep everything in Evernote. And then what kind of ended up happening for me is just like I had stuff in Evernote. I had some other tool. I had, uh, s- maybe something in like Apple Notes, and then there were Google Docs, and then some people were like, “Well, I don’t trust Google. I wanna use Microsoft Office products and their storage.”
So I just had like a scattered mess of like different stuff everywhere, and certainly less fun. If you have a specific problem that you’re needing to solve, and maybe there is that, that one solution that does work, maybe Notion is the perfect thing for you to use or fill in the blank something else. A lot of times, there’s a very large amount of overhead, and I found this with, um, certain tools.
So I was using… Actually, I won’t mention the specific companies ’cause I can’t quite remember, but I was using some email, um, marketing company solution, and then I had a good offer to move to a newer company, and in fact, they were gonna like migrate me over and really help me out and all this stuff.
Maybe it was gonna be cheaper, maybe it was gonna be better. The thing is, um, if you’re migrating from an existing solution that works, for me, it has to be like dramatically cheaper or a huge upgrade in service or features or benefits just in general. Because the overhead of moving to a new tool, sure, you have to learn how to use it, and a lot of stuff is like fairly straightforward.
It’s not gonna really take too long to become familiar and even master it if you’re using it all the time. But like the overhead of migration, there’s always some fuck up. There’s always something that didn’t quite work how it was supposed to, and there’s always some collateral damage. So there’s a lot of unaccounted for cost when you switch tools.
And again, there’s, there’s basically only trade-offs. So after some time, I was like, “You know what? I am on the inferior tool, but it is currently working for what I need it to do, and it’s better than me trying to find a better solution.” Maybe it’s only ten percent better a- and maybe it’s, whatever, ten percent better and ten percent cheaper.
That’s not really good enough for me to switch. It has to be a fairly dramatic, uh, upgrade or much, much cheaper or something like that.
Keep It Simple
Number three, simple is always better. There’s less to go wrong. It’s usually easier to fix. With, uh, complexity, it’s more likely that something might go wrong, and it’ll be more confusing to figure out.
A lot of times, the simple solution is cheaper as well, and it goes on and on and on. It’s just… it’s less stress. It’s easier to learn, it’s easier to implement, it’s easier to switch if you want to, and I think in almost every situation, simple is gonna be better. Just a quick one.
Analysis Paralysis
Number four, analysis paralysis.
Basically having too many choices, having too much data in the form of, uh, metrics and any kind of analytics can actually seize you up and prevent you from taking action. So instead of actually executing, you get stuck in a loop of getting more information and analyzing more of the information that you obtained to hopefully…
I mean, the idea is like you’re gonna try to find the perfect solution. But the thing is, uh, refer to number one, there’s no perfect solution, there’s only trade-offs.
Good Enough and Choice
Number five, the good enough principle, which is, um… I mean, this is why I thrive, I think. It’s like low expectations with the idea of satisficing, and that is the antithesis of maximizing.
So if you haven’t read The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, it’s very good. I think it could be… It’s a couple hundred pages. It’s great. Uh, you know, read it. It can be condensed into a ten-page, uh, pamphlet, I think, and you would get the point. The background story is very helpful, but at the end of the day, like, y-you, um, you can get the point really quick, which I’ll basically explain from, from memory here.
So maximizing is where you’re essentially over optimizing, you’re trying to find the perfect solution, you’re trying to find the best solution, and satisficing is essentially like finding the, the minimum satisfactory solution, and it’s a combination of the words. It’s, uh, satisfy and, uh, what’s the other half?
People out there are yelling. I knew it at some point, and I’ll remember it probably in the middle of the night. It’ll wake me up, and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, satisficing.” And so satisfy
And I’ll leave this long pause in here. So anyway, um, maximizing is kind of a, a downfall, which I’ll talk to a, a little bit more in a second. But basically, I know I’m not gonna find the best solution, so I don’t waste my fucking time trying to find it. I have usually some minimum criteria that I’m looking for, and then I will find something that works.
I’ll give a few specific examples and some examples where I’m actually pretty bad at not maximizing or not attempting to maximize. So the area that I’m, I’m good at is, um, like booking travel and, uh, there’s a little debate, uh, within the household, but I will often, um Find a flight, I will book the flight.
I might look a little bit, maybe over the course of a couple weeks, but I’ll look at what the prices are, what they, uh, should be, and the highs and lows, and, and maybe if we’re at a very high period, I will wait a little bit and see if it drops down. But typically, it will take me, like, one to two weeks to, to book a flight.
If it’s cheap, if I s- if I know that it’s cheap, I will book it immediately. Um, another area, like I, I booked a trip for, uh, my dad and I about a year ago. We stayed at a couple hotels. We drove up to Yellowstone, stayed at a couple lodges, and basically, I was able to do all of that within a couple of hours.
And we stayed at, whatever, five different pla- six different places, something like that. We were moving quite a bit and, you know, some of the choices are limited because there’s only so many lodges in Yellowstone. But in a general sense, I was like, “Okay, I’ll pick this hotel chain. It is fine, and we’ll aim for those along the way, unless there’s some, you know, reason not to.”
And I’m able to book it pretty quick. The other side of that is trying to find, like, the perfect flight, where you’re looking at all these different, um, airlines and you’re like, “Well, I really wanna try to get the cheapest flight.” Like you’re optimizing… Like maybe you’re trying to optimize for the lowest price.
And there’s, you know, you can get the lowest price, but guess what? The flight leaves at five fifty AM, and you have to head to the airport at like three AM. So like that’s not fun, and there’s some balance between the two. So I’ll usually find like the, the medium ground. Now, before I tell you the thing that I’m not great at, I will move ahead to the paradox of choice, where essentially the idea here is having more options.
Maybe it’s the different tools or workflows or methods, um, or in the case of travel, there’s all these different flights, there’s different times, different days. Um, f- from a hotel perspective, there’s, you know, if it’s a big city, you may have a hundred different hotels that you can choose from and, you know, usually you’re able to whittle it down to a neighborhood, but like you have, um, so many different choices.
And the issue with this paradox of choice is you typically have like a lower satisfaction with whatever choice that you make. And that’s because you’re constantly wondering if another choice was actually a little bit better or even a lot better, right? And the thing is I don’t know all the different choices ’cause I don’t look.
But if you spend a lot of time looking at maybe all the Airbnbs in an area, and you know there’s, you know, a hundred of them that would be really pretty good, and you’re trying to narrow it down, and you don’t have a good criteria on how to do that, once you pick something, you know there were potentially, you know, dozens of others that could have been better, and ultimately it makes you less content with wherever you’re at.
So from my perspective, it’s great to have, um, this, this pure ignorance about not knowing the other stuff that’s out there. And it works well, it works well for me.
Hobbies and Product Research
So the area that I’m not great at, and it’s, it’s something that I actually enjoy a little bit, but I need to make sure I don’t get in my way too much.
So one thing is like these, uh, guitars and musical instruments and amps. I like learning about the guitars. I like the history and the stories, and I like used guitars, and I like getting a deal. So I’m like researching, and I’m like, “I think I would probably like this certain kind of guitar, but I’m not a hundred percent sure.
Maybe it would be cool to upgrade the pickups and put like a higher grade pickup.” So there’s, there’s some benefit for me to have a hobby where I’m like researching and learning and I’m playing something, and then maybe I’m, uh, learning, uh, how to solder again and stuff like that. So it’s not totally useless.
One other area is like amps. So I have like a couple amps, and I’m like, “Oh, this sounds really, um, pretty cool. I think I do wanna try to get one of those amps.” So I’m constantly, um, looking, and I’m looking on like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, and I’m like, “Okay, is there an amp out there that looks to be a pretty good deal, in good condition that I could enjoy?”
And it could be a fine hobby as long as I’m not a fucking hoarder about it and never give, uh, or never sell anything and keep everything. But I have been releasing some of these back into the wild and selling them, and I’ve mentioned a few times like as long as I get a reasonably good deal when I buy it, there’s a strong chance maybe I’ll break even on it.
Um, I’ve actually made money, not intentionally. I bought certain things thinking, “Hey, I’m gonna probably keep this forever. Like I, I can’t imagine like I’m gonna sell it.” But at some point I wasn’t playing a guitar as much, and I’m like, “Okay, I, I will… I’ll sell it. It’s, it’s no big deal,” and I got such a good deal when I bought it that I made some money.
All that to say, I do expect some of them that I sell, I’m gonna lose money. Not, not a ton. I’m not gonna like sell it, uh, for like half the price that I got it for. It’ll probably be a little bit less. Now On to more product research. So I’ve also mentioned not, not too long ago, hey, I need to get new, uh, computers.
So I’m recording on a, a MacBook Air M1, which I think was from like 2020. I typically buy refurbished from Apple. So I think I got this… I– You know what? I can’t remember. Maybe these last couple I got on eBay ’cause I think I bought a couple on eBay. But anyway, I’ve had this machine for maybe five and a half years, something like that, and I think it was, you know, one of the first models with the M1 processor, so I’m actually able to record the 4K from the upgraded camera up there.
But my Mac Mini in the front i- is a 2018. M- my stuff’s getting old and, you know, it’s great with, um, Apple products. They last a really long time, or at least longer than I remember, um, my typical Windows machine lasting. So they’re great pieces of hardware. I rarely have any issues with them at all, and I’ve been extremely happy.
But I, I’m also like… I, I researched and this may have been like a month or two ago maybe. Yeah, probably a couple months ago. I was like, “Yeah, I think I need to probably get a new laptop or a computer.” I was gonna get a Mac Mini, but then the prices went up on memory, and they went up on hard drive space too.
So prices went up, and I was like, “Oh, shit Whatever I was looking at before, it was like 650, and now it’s about $1,000 with like a two-month wait. So I was like, “Oh, crap.” I was– I kept doing research and I was like, um, I’m, I wanna optimize a little bit. I wanna do a little bit better. And then I was like, well, maybe I could buy a used one from Marketplace, but it’s a little bit more risky than, you know, buying a guitar.
Like I could, I could tell a guitar is like in working shape in just a couple minutes. But if I’m buying like a Mac Mini, like I need a monitor to hook it up. I don’t know if it’s gonna overheat, if I… Y- you know, there could be some underlying issue. Extremely rare, but it is possible. So anyway, eventually, yesterday, I was like, “I need to get a new computer.”
Like I’m trying to optimize for a small amount of savings. It’s a few hundred dollars, right? Don’t get me wrong. It’s a few hundred bucks. But I was like, I’ve been waiting and it’s actually not a better solution. It’s actually a worse solution now than whatever I found in the past. So that hurts a little bit.
That said, what I ended up getting was a refurbished from Apple, and it’s a MacBook Pro M5. Not as much memory as I would’ve hoped, and back in the day, I would’ve just, you know, opened up the machine, installed new memory, upgraded it or whatever. Very c– I used to build my own machine, so totally fine to do that kind of stuff.
But nowadays, a lot of times they’re, uh, I mean, they’re s- soldered into the motherboard, so you can’t do anything. Like, whatever memory you get, that’s what you have. So anyway, I got a refurbished one, and it’s a little bit more than what I was planning on. But with all my Facebook Marketplace experience, I’m planning on selling the Mac Mini for sure, um, potentially this laptop and just decluttering ’cause it, it’s like, you know, once you get something new, you gotta do something with the old stuff.
There’s some value left in these, but I need to figure out, like… Anyway, I’m gonna sell them, so. Paradox of choice. The more I looked, the more I was like, “Oh, should I have gotten another…” And I was doing research. Should I get the, you know, MacBook Air M4 with thirty-two gigs of memory versus the M5 with sixteen that’s a MacBook Pro?
And they all– There’s pros and cons, and at the end of the day, I was like, “I’ll go with the MacBook Pro.” I’ve been doing some remote live streaming, uh, gigs in the last year or two, or a few years actually. So I’m actually doing more of that, and I was like, having a good mobile, um, laptop is probably better.
And, you know, I could just plug in, you know, USB hubs, and I’ll be good to go to use it as my desktop as well. Okay.
Maintenance and Opportunity Cost
Number seven, the cost of maintenance. So Think about, you know, moving over to Notion or some other workflow type solution. The thing is, once you get migrated over, that’s, that’s fine. Like, you know it’s gonna take some migration, some learning, and whatever.
If, if it’s a complex system, like for example, and I’m just… You know, I, I’ll– You know what? It’s better if I use a real example that I know about. So forget about Notion. So back in the day, I had like funnel, evergreen funnel software. So I would have my digital product, and someone could enter the, the funnel at any time all through the year, and then they would go through the normal marketing flow.
They would get emails, they would get launch emails and then the offer. And you know, any time someone entered the funnel, whatever, f- forty days later, they would finish the funnel, they would get the offer, and it was all, you know, optimized in a way where people got the offer when they had enough information, and they were around the content long enough that I found that that was the perfect sort of length.
But anyway, I migrated over to this funnel software, and essentially there… It was automated, and it was great when it worked. But there was maintenance, ongoing maintenance because, say there were about five tools associated with it. It was like email, uh, the core software, um, you had payments, so it was like Stripe and PayPal, and then things were just interfaced together.
So some of them had native, um, links and APIs where they would interface, um, and integrate, um, natively. Others, I had to use Zapier to hook them up, which, hey, it works great when it works. But every now and then, whenever the interface, um, resets or they make a change, even if it’s not a minor change or it’s not a major change, it’s just something pretty minor.
Maybe they just reboot it in the interface, the port goes down, and the APIs can’t talk for a second, and then it’s like n- nothing works. The whole thing breaks. So you end up with a situation where I’m like, “Oh, I got an email that these, this interface is down, and I have to figure out like what went wrong.”
So there’s always more maintenance, and it may not come up often, but when it does, it’s a new thing and you have to figure out what to do. So there’s, there’s issues, there’s maintenance with the complexity that you’ve added in there. Even if it’s a better solution when everything works, occasionally things are not gonna work.
Finally, number eight is the opportunity cost. So, so many things come down to the opportunity cost, and when you look at, you know, the time that you’re investing in optimizing, over-optimizing in this case, and maximizing and trying to find the very best solution, that’s an hour spent, you know, not doing something that actually is productive.
Um, maybe it’s the creative work that you’re doing. Maybe you’re, you know, running an agency. Maybe your time is better spent, you know, filling the pipeline, doing marketing, business development, so that you have clients to, uh, continue to do work for. But when it comes down to it, and this is the, you know, the other, the other thing, I mean, a lot of us picked up these side hustles, we started working for ourselves, so that we could do things aside from work, spend time with our families or friends or, uh, the hobbies that I mentioned earlier.
I mean, that’s totally valid, so I mean, because you’re able to free up time in certain areas, it doesn’t mean that you should fill it with doing more work. And I definitely encourage people to fill it with more leisure stuff or– And the leisure stuff could be spending time with your family and friends, which is always a good choice.
You almost never have any kind of regret around that. It depends on your family and friends, I guess. But generally, that is a good move. That’s a way to spend your time where you’re gonna be happy about doing it while you’re doing it, and afterwards, you’re gonna be very happy with that decision too. So the opportunity cost for us to fuck around and, like, try to optimize our workflows, maybe it’s better spent elsewhere.
In fact, almost certainly better spent elsewhere. Once you have a, you know, viable, the simplest solution that you could use, man, it’s pretty tough for me to, you know, back up and look at it and think it’s better if you try to optimize this a little bit more. Try, try to do a little bit more.
Manual First Then Automate
And the caveat, I will say, I mean, there have been times where I, I’ve, uh, worked on something for a little while.
Maybe it’s my, my YouTube workflow. I did a presentation on this at some point, I can’t remember when, a few years ago. But I, I was like, “You know what? I’m gonna publish, uh, a video every day.” And the thing is, I, I had to do things normally first. I had to learn what the process was gonna look like, and I needed to do it manually.
I needed to do it myself for a little while, and then maybe I brought in a little help to do certain things. But, you know, the, the big thing if you need to optimize and set up your systems is to do things manually as much as possible first. One of the big issues that I have seen is people will, like They’ll do something once and they’re like, “Well, I’m gonna have to do this all the time.
I’m gonna set up all these systems and automations around it.” And then they realize that the way that they did it initially was actually not a good way to do it, and they probably should do it some different way. But they’ve now set up some bullshit automations around it, so you end up with like they feel bad because of the sunk cost around changing what they’ve already set up.
Perfect example, contrast, um, you know, m- me doing it what I think is the right way and someone else doing it the wrong way. I mentioned the Evergreen funnel. I didn’t set up an Evergreen funnel until I was selling my course every quarter for two years. So it was after two years of tweaking things, I was like, “Okay, I think this funnel is in a good enough spot where I could put up some automation around it.”
That was actually like specifically noted in the software, or not in the software, in the, uh, course that I took around setting up an Evergreen funnel. So I was chatting with a friend, and basically he set up his… one of his first courses, and then he was like, “All right. Perfect. I launched it once. Now I’m gonna take all those emails and then just put ’em in a autoresponder sequence.”
And he never– he didn’t test anything. He never tested anything at all. He just tried to automate it, and he would come back, and he was like, “Yeah, it’s just, you know, people aren’t buying the stuff, and, um, you know, they, they don’t want it, I guess.” And it was, you know, j- just a lack of… It, it was laziness, which I’m a lazy person, but it’s like y- you have to do, do the work up front.
You have to figure out like what works, and the person never put in the time to figure out what works. In my, you know, launches, I would tweak. I wasn’t doing it perfectly, but I would tweak like, you know, one or two things each time. One of the hardest puzzles to figure out is like pricing because at the end of the day, you just have to fucking guess.
So you could look at what competitors are doing and that can get you close, but your specific market area might be a little bit different and you may have to test, um, different prices, and that’s pretty hard. And if you don’t test it, then you have no clue what’s gonna work. Or, I mean, maybe you get more sales, but maybe you have more returns at a specific price point, and then if you charge more, you don’t sell as many, but you have fewer, um, you know, issues.
Maybe the clients are easier to work with because it’s a better price point, it’s a better client overall. So that’s the kind of stuff you would have to test and you won’t know it. And I think you do have to put in, like I said, the time to figure out what will work and what won’t.
Wrap Up and Whats Next
So that was all about over-optimizing.
Coming soon, we’ll have the episode with Paul Lipsky, who is crushing it on YouTube. And I will, uh, I think I need to get in touch with a few more musicians over on YouTube. I’ve enjoyed those series. It’s been really fun chatting, getting to know some of the YouTubers that I watch, and then geek out on guitars and stuff, and then also, you know, let them talk about their YouTube journey, which they usually don’t get to talk about very much.
So thanks a lot. If you have any show ideas or questions or comments or anything like that, you could leave a comment on the YouTube side or you could send an email, feedback@doug.show.