Is It Worth The Time? (2026 Edition)
Perfectionism Is Usually the Enemy — Except Here
I’m generally not a fan of perfectionism. For most things, done is better than perfect, and the pursuit of perfect is just procrastination wearing a lab coat.
But there’s one exception: your daily routine.
A well-designed routine is different from other kinds of work. It compounds. Every small improvement — shaving two minutes off your morning, automating a task you repeat fifteen times a day — pays dividends every single time you do it. The more choreographed your routine, the less mental effort it takes to execute, and the easier it is to slip into a flow state. For someone with ADHD, that’s not a small thing.
So when it comes to routines, a little perfectionism is actually justified. The question is: how much is justified?
A client recently shared a comic from XKCD titled “Is It Worth the Time?” It answers a simple but surprisingly useful question: how long can you spend optimizing a task before the time you invest outweighs the time you’ll ever save?
The original was a static lookup table — frequency on one axis, time saved on the other, and the answer in each cell. I loved the concept. But it was harder to read than it needed to be, and it didn’t let you think through your own specific situation.
So I rebuilt it as an interactive tool — one I’ve been sharing with coaching clients for a while now. Today I’m making it public.
Is It Worth the Time?
See exactly when your time investment pays off — and how much you’ll gain beyond that.
How to use it
Set the three sliders to match a task you’re thinking about improving:
- How often you do the task (daily email triage? weekly report? something you do 50 times a day without thinking about it?)
- How much time each individual use would save if you optimized it
- How long you’d need to invest upfront to make the improvement
The graph shows cumulative time saved growing over time. The orange dashed line is your upfront investment. Where they cross — marked by the green vertical line — is your break-even point. Everything to the right of that line is pure gain.
A few things to notice: small savings on high-frequency tasks break even very quickly. A 30-second improvement on something you do 50 times a day pays back in hours. On the other end, spending a full day automating something you do once a month might take years to justify — if ever.
The ADHD angle
People with ADHD often either over-invest in optimization (endless system-building, productivity rabbit holes) or dismiss it entirely (“I’ll never stick to it anyway”). This tool is a useful reality check for both.
If the break-even is a week, that’s a no-brainer — do it. If it’s three years, it’s worth asking whether the system will still be running in three years, or whether the energy is better spent elsewhere.
The point isn’t to optimize everything. It’s to optimize the things that are actually worth it, and make peace with leaving the rest good enough.
If you want help designing routines that actually stick — not just in theory, but for your specific brain — that’s exactly what ADHD coaching is for. Book a free consult to see if we’re a good fit.