Are You Optimizing the Joy Out of Your Life?

The Most Productive 10 Minutes of My Day Are Completely Useless

I’ve been doing yoga more regularly lately, and every time I roll out my mat, my dog Hopper loses his mind.

To me, the yoga mat means I’m about to spend 20 minutes being healthy, mindful, and intentional. To Hopper, apparently, it means I’ve just unrolled the wrestling carpet.

The second I get down on the floor, he runs over and starts nibbling my arms and legs. My dog doesn’t really lick—he “corn cobs.” He does this little cha-cha-cha-cha nibbling thing like he’s eating corn off the cob. Then he tackles me, climbs on me, and generally does everything possible to prevent me from accomplishing the very serious task of stretching in sweatpants.

For a while, I tried to stop him. I only had 20 minutes. I wanted to get my yoga done, do it correctly, and move on with my day.

Then I realized something: I was fighting the best part of the entire process.

When the Routine Becomes More Important Than the Life

I was measuring the success of my yoga by whether I completed the workout. What I wasn’t measuring was whether I was actually enjoying myself.

Meanwhile, Hopper was making me laugh harder than almost anything else in my day, and I was basically telling him, “Please stop bringing me joy. I’m trying to improve my wellbeing.”

That seems a little ridiculous when you put it that way.

Eventually, I realized I didn’t have to choose between discipline and enjoyment. I could still exercise. I could still have the routine. I could also let my dog tackle me for a few minutes and enjoy my life.

So I stopped trying to fit my life around my routine and started fitting my routine around my life.

I made my yoga time about ten minutes longer, and now the first ten minutes are deliberately reserved for me and Hopper to wrestle, play, and be ridiculous. I call it Doggy Daddy Time—or sometimes Hopper Papa Time, depending on how sophisticated I’m feeling.

Those ten minutes accomplish absolutely nothing.

And they might be the most productive part of my day.

Have We Made Healthy Habits Too Miserable?

There’s an idea in habit formation about pairing something you need to do with something you genuinely enjoy. I think we could probably use a lot more of that.

So many of our healthy habits are framed like punishment. We exercise because we should. We meditate because we should. We read because we should. We get our steps because our watch has apparently become a tiny judgmental supervisor attached to our wrist.

Discipline is important, but if every healthy thing you do feels like another obligation to complete, that seems like a pretty sad way to live.

For me, adding play to yoga has made the habit easier to repeat because now there’s something about it I genuinely look forward to. Maybe for you that means listening to your favorite podcast while you work out, watching a show while you stretch, walking to get coffee instead of walking just to hit a step goal, or finding some other way to attach something enjoyable to something you know you want to do.

It turns out hard things get a little easier when we stop insisting they have to feel hard.

Are We Optimizing the Joy Out of Our Lives?

I’m guilty of something that also drives me crazy about modern life: trying to optimize every minute like my existence is a spreadsheet.

Did I meditate for the right number of minutes? Did I get enough steps? Did I optimize my morning routine? Was I productive enough today? Could I have gotten more done?

We track all of it.

But I almost never get to the end of a day and ask, “Did I have fun today?”

What did I enjoy? When did I laugh? What happened today that I might actually want to remember?

There’s good reason to pay attention to those questions. Research in positive psychology has found that deliberately savoring positive experiences can contribute to greater wellbeing. But we don’t always give ourselves much opportunity to savor anything when we’re rushing from one task to the next.

Sometimes I think we spend so much time trying to optimize the hell out of life that we optimize the joy out of it.

I’m not going to remember which yoga routine I completed on a random Tuesday 20 years from now. I have a feeling I will remember rolling around on the floor while Hopper “corn cobbed” my stomach and I laughed so hard I could barely breathe.

Those are the moments that make up a life, too. Maybe more than we realize.

Take a Vacation From Your Serious Self

There’s another thing Hopper has accidentally taught me: being ridiculous is good for me.

I’m a grown man, nearly 50 years old, willingly having a tickle fight with my dog on a yoga mat.

There is nothing dignified about it. I’m not practicing “mindful canine interaction.” I’m rolling around on the floor laughing like a child.

And for those ten minutes, I’m not a professional speaker. I’m not thinking about work. I’m not trying to be productive. I’m not overthinking something I said three days ago.

It’s like taking a little vacation from my serious self.

We tend to think enjoying life requires something big. We need the vacation, the weekend getaway, the dinner reservation, the concert, the perfectly planned experience. Those things are great, but I’m starting to think we underestimate what ten genuinely enjoyable minutes in an ordinary day can do.

If there’s something small that reliably makes you laugh, makes you feel playful, or makes you forget about yourself for a few minutes, maybe it deserves an actual place in your life instead of being something you’ll get around to “when you have time.”

What Are You Just Trying to Get Through?

So here’s the question I’ve been thinking about:

What part of your day are you just trying to get through?

Maybe it’s your commute. Maybe it’s exercising. Maybe it’s getting the kids ready for school, walking the dog, cooking dinner, cleaning the house, or some other routine you’ve mentally categorized as a task that needs to be completed as efficiently as possible.

What if there’s something inside that routine you’re missing because you’re so focused on getting to the end?

Could you make it a little more enjoyable? A little weirder? Could you put on music, call somebody you love, take the longer route, play with your kid, wrestle with your dog, or just stop for a second and appreciate that this ordinary thing you’re rushing through is part of your actual life?

Now, every time I do yoga—okay, if I’m being honest, every other day—I get on the mat and spend about ten minutes completely abandoning my dignity with Hopper.

I still do the yoga afterward. I’m still getting the exercise. I haven’t abandoned discipline in favor of becoming a full-time dog wrestler.

But I’ve stopped believing the routine has to go perfectly for it to count.

Maybe the goal isn’t to build a life so optimized that we’re never interrupted.

Maybe sometimes the interruption is the life.

And I don’t know if yoga is making my life better yet, but I know those ten completely useless minutes are.

In this episode:

• Why optimizing every part of your life can actually make it less enjoyable

• What my dog taught me about happiness during yoga

• How to pair healthy habits with things you genuinely enjoy

• Why discipline and enjoyment don't have to be opposites

• How play and silliness can get us out of our own heads

• Why small moments of joy matter

• The importance of making time to be weird

• How to stop taking yourself—and your routines—so seriously

• Why interruptions sometimes become our favorite memories

• One question to ask yourself about the parts of your day you're rushing through

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