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Comment by barik | Hacker News Reader

This article was actually really confusing. It reminded me of people who spend their time coming up with the "perfect productivity system", a quest which ends up ironically consuming all their time and preventing them from actually getting any real work done. I largely wear the same thing every day too -- I have 5 pairs of jeans, a single pair of shoes, and a bunch of polo shorts that I bought on sale once. Regardless of what I pick, it matches, so there is really no decision at all.

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I think it comes from a background of having to decide what to wear to make a statement, something that men don't usually have to do on a daily basis, but is common for a lot of women, especially women in some form of design industry. I guess changing the training of years can be a major mental shift - good luck to her, and it can be thinned out even more as time goes on.

How did her sitting down and thinking about her clothes sudden "consume all her time?"

Well, for example she states that she came up with this system to not lose time getting dressed in the morning.

Writing that blog post in itself probably took more than a few hours — to write, review, edit, do the graphics for it, etc. If the initial goal was to spend time not thinking about clothes, that doesn't really feel like an optimal way to reach it.

Good point, though the amount of time I've saved, in the end, has far exceeded any time I spent thinking about it earlier (or writing that post, which was mainly for others that I've talked to before who were curious to hear details).

> If the initial goal was to spend time not thinking about clothes, that doesn't really feel like an optimal way to reach it.

Why not? It's called optimization. You spend time once to improve a process, and reap savings from that moment on.

the blogosphere is full of posts by people who spend the time and trouble to solve a problem once and for all, and then share how they did it. it's sad that the comments here are so patronising.

Tell me about it. :(

Sometimes I wonder if HN posters like to be argumentative simply for the sake of being argumentative. My exact statement was, "It reminded me of people ...", which this article does in fact remind me of.

That is, there are people who spend much of their time doing "lifehacks" through these sorts of peep-hole optimizations [1], and this clothing strategy feels representative of such actions. I can easily see someone who is already a "lifehacker" adding this to their existing system.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4012852

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