What is min-maxing? If you do not play video games you may not be familiar with the term. Min-maxing has its roots in gaming. It refers to the practice of playing a game with perfect mathematical efficiency, in-order to achieve the best possible chance at success. This could mean crafting the perfectly balanced gun in Call of Duty or choosing the perfect set of abilities for your class in a game like World of Warcraft. As an avid gamer and someone with a competitive nature I was a slave to the min-maxing process. Despite its clear hand in improving success, it sucks some aspects of the game away - the satisfaction of playing the game how you want to play it. You instead have to spend time doing research on how the play the game most efficiently. I didn’t realize how sucked into the process I was until it started bleeding into my life outside of video games.

I first noticed my addiction to min-maxing after I told myself I was going to start journalling. I began as most people do by handwriting my journal using a pen and paper. It didn’t take long before I began to question my speed while using a pen. Not only was it slow to journal with a pen, it was also less effective in-terms of storage, retrieval, and security. You can’t password protect a handwritten journal. At least not as easily as you can a computer. To be fair, the quality of my handwriting would probably not be decipherable by most either way. I was not naive to the fact that maybe efficiency was not the goal when journalling. Maybe the goal is to be more mindful and slow. So I dusted off my keyboard and started researching. I found arguments on both sides of the camp. I ended up trying out both hand written and typed to see if I preferred one or the other. Typing my journal opened a whole new can of worms as now I started looking into the best software for note taking and journaling. I spent a lot of time going down the the Obsidian rabbit hole..

After spending hours customizing note taking tools and trying different strategies I realized that I was not spending time doing what my original goal was in the first place - journalling. My takeaway from this was to always remind myself of my goal and to ensure that I do not get lost in the path to achieving that goal. Keep the path simple and allow yourself to dedicate all of your time walking down it.