How NOT to Use AI in Customer Support (And How to Do It Without Annoying Humans)
Somewhere on the internet, someone is turning a perfectly normal task into a color-coded, AI-assisted, KPI-tracked ritual that takes 45 minutes and produces… nothing. If that feels uncomfortably familiar, good. This is your friendly reminder that optimization is supposed to reduce work, not become your new hobby.
Why over-optimization feels so productive (and isn’t)
Over-optimization is productivity cosplay. It looks impressive in screenshots, sounds responsible in conversations, and creates a warm illusion of control. But it often replaces the messy thing that matters (doing the work) with a clean thing that doesn’t (designing the system).
The dopamine trap: measuring beats making
Metrics give instant feedback. Real outcomes don’t. So you start tracking things that are easy to count: minutes meditated, pages read, macros hit, emails at inbox zero. Meanwhile, the hard-to-measure goals—shipping, learning, relationships, health—quietly wait in the corner like an ignored plant.
How NOT to over-optimize your life
Below is a curated list of the worst practices. If you recognize yourself, congratulations: you’re normal. Also: stop it.
1) Build a system for a problem you don’t actually have
Spending an afternoon creating a “decision framework” for choosing toothpaste is a strong sign you’re avoiding something scarier—like making a meaningful decision where you could be wrong.
Do this instead: If the stakes are low, pick quickly and move on. Save the frameworks for the few decisions that actually deserve them (career moves, major purchases, long-term commitments).
2) Turn every hobby into a performance review
If your “relaxing run” now includes heart-rate zones, stride analytics, and a post-run spreadsheet, you didn’t optimize your hobby. You fired the hobby and hired a part-time manager.
Do this instead: Keep one hobby intentionally unoptimized. No tracking. No goals. Just doing it badly on purpose, like a human.
3) Treat tools like progress
New app, new template, new planner, new “second brain.” The purchase feels like change. The setup feels like momentum. Then you realize you’ve built a beautiful cockpit… for a plane that isn’t moving.
Do this instead: Pick boring tools that get out of the way. A notes app. A calendar. A to-do list. If you need a tutorial to use your productivity tool, it may be the problem.
4) Optimize mornings until they’re unlivable
Wake at 5:00. Cold plunge. Gratitude journal. Mobility work. Deep work block. Protein shake. Sunrise walk. Somewhere around step seven, you realize you’ve created a morning that only works if you never have children, friends, travel, illness, or joy.
Do this instead: Design routines that survive real life. A “minimum viable morning” is more useful than the perfect morning you can’t repeat.
5) Confuse “busy” with “effective”
Over-optimization loves motion. Rearranging tasks, rescheduling tasks, reprioritizing tasks. You can spend hours managing work you haven’t done yet. It’s like polishing a car you never drive.
Do this instead: Choose one outcome for the day that would make everything else easier. Do it first. Let the smaller tasks fight among themselves.
6) Optimize everything except your constraints
You can’t hack your way around sleep deprivation. You can’t shortcut a lack of skills. You can’t replace a supportive environment with a better calendar.
Do this instead: Identify the real bottleneck: sleep, focus, energy, environment, skill, or time. Improve that. Most “productivity problems” are actually constraint problems wearing a fake mustache.
7) Make “planning” a full-time job
If your weekly review takes two hours, your system is not a system—it’s an additional project. And it’s a project with a cruel twist: it expands to consume the time you meant to protect.
Do this instead: Put a timer on planning. Ten minutes daily. Thirty minutes weekly. When the timer ends, you start doing, even if the plan is imperfect. Especially if the plan is imperfect.
8) Chase “perfect” consistency like it’s a personality trait
The internet loves streaks. Life loves interruption. When consistency becomes the goal, you start making decisions to protect the streak instead of the outcome. You’ll do a tiny symbolic action just to say you did it, then call it discipline.
Do this instead: Optimize for returning, not never missing. The grown-up version of consistency is resilience: you fall off, you get back on, you don’t write a tragic essay about it.
A simple anti-over-optimization checklist
Try these when you feel yourself spiraling into system-building:
- What am I avoiding? (Be honest. It’s usually a conversation or a hard task.)
- What’s the smallest next action? (Not the best one. The smallest.)
- What would I do if I had no apps? (Do that for 20 minutes.)
- Can I delete a step? (If not, can I make it uglier and faster?)
What “good optimization” actually looks like
Good optimization is usually boring:
- Fewer decisions, not more dashboards
- Fewer steps, not prettier steps
- Clear boundaries (“I stop working at 6”), not endless tweaks
- Systems that work on your worst day, not just your best day
Final thought: optimize for outcomes, not aesthetics
Systems are great servants and terrible masters. Keep the parts that remove friction and quietly throw away the parts that make you feel virtuous while you stand still. The goal isn’t to run your life like a spreadsheet. The goal is to live it.
