Asian Efficiency

How many decisions did you make before lunch?

Start with the inbox. Processing a single email takes four micro-decisions: reply, flag, archive, or defer. Across 50 emails, that creates over 200 tiny choices before lunch. The work you sat down to do is still sitting there...

Something broke. The first question was a strange one: what preventative maintenance could have avoided this? A small routine. A recurring check. Something small adopted so the same thing doesn’t fail again.

That’s the move.

I do my real work on my desktop. Every build check meant grabbing the laptop, opening it, and logging in. I described the whole frustrating situation to Claude. It proposed something I hadn’t thought of. A fiddly laptop routine turned into a five-minute fix.

If you can say a friction point in plain language, an AI will often find a workaround you didn’t know existed.

I added plants to my workspace. It felt noticeably more soothing and calming. That is my own experience, and I want to be honest about the size of it. I changed one thing in the room. The room felt better to be in.

A productive desk doesn’t have to be an empty desk. Alongside removing distracting clutter, keep a plant, a picture, or a

I was at lunch with a high-performing professional when they told me about an unexpected one-hour gap on their calendar. They felt anxious about it. Their instinct was to fill the hour with email.

That moment showed me how many ambitious people have trained themselves to see unscheduled time as a problem. I treat an open hour as a resource. The anxiety makes sense if y...