Raise Your Awareness by Embracing Overhead

For the last two or three years, my wife and I have been tracking expenses by sending a quick message to a small Telegram bot. It adds a little bit of work every time, and that is exactly the point.

Sometimes a bit of overhead is what makes sure things actually get done instead of staying half-done. What looks like extra work and wasted time at first can turn out to be the thing that keeps us moving, because it raises our awareness.

Say I want to save money, lose weight, get fit, learn something new, etc. I might have that initial spark to change things and be more conscious about how I spend, eat, or manage my time. But in my experience, that spark fades and gives way to the old habits more often than I'd like to admit.

#Experiment #1

The idea is simple: raise my awareness of the goal by adding some overhead. That spending bot is a good example. It works more or less like this: whenever my wife and I spend money on something, we track it right away with a simple Telegram message:

/spent food 10

> Transaction #123 10.00 was added successfully.
> food - 30.00

The setup was simple. It was just a private Telegram group with the bot and the two of us in it.

It's easy to build a similar bot for the other goals I mentioned, but it doesn't even need to be a bot. At first we just had the Telegram group where we sent the messages, and I'd add them to a spreadsheet later. I'm sure there are many apps or bots that do the same.

#Reasonable Overhead

In my case, the spreadsheet overhead became too big for me to bother with. It just ended up like everything else, fading away, although it did work better and for longer than not doing it at all.

By Reasonable Overhead I mean the sweet spot where the tracking is light enough that you keep doing it, but still enough to keep you aware. It's not only personal, it's also dynamic, so you might need to adjust it over time. It's basically self-discovery. If you pay attention, you'll eventually learn what works for you and what does not, although what worked before won't always work in the future.

#Experiment #2

Not long after I joined Laravel as a Tech Support Engineer, I realized that tech support is very different from a regular dev job in terms of how many tasks you handle in a day. It's normal to work on 10-20 tickets or more per day, and all that context switching can be a problem. I get distracted easily, and every context switch was one more chance to lose focus.

#The 1st Attempt

My first attempt was just a Markdown file where I listed the ticket IDs as I worked on them, along with some other things I did. It did add some overhead, although very little. That simple change helped me stay focused.

Why? I'm not entirely sure, but it helped. I think I started getting a sense of my baseline volume, so I knew I would usually do 10-20 tickets a day. If I was only seeing 3 tickets that day, it meant I was doing poorly, and that would just trigger the beast inside me eheh.

The Markdown looked more or less like this:

## Fri 2026-01-30
### Tickets
- 01. Vapor   - T-0010
- 02. Forge   - T-0020
- 03. Cloud   - T-0030
- 04. Nova    - T-0040
- 05. Spark   - T-0050
- 06. Envoyer - T-0060
- 07. Cloud   - T-0070
- 08. Cloud   - T-0080

### Other
- 01. PR #1 updating Cloud docs https://github....
- 02. 

#The Improvement

As time went on, I created a simple Laravel app to do the same thing but with more data points. It helped me track how long I stayed on each ticket, and I added some metadata to every ticket so I could get nice reports on what I was spending the most time on.

I've been using it ever since, and I keep making small improvements. I try to keep the overhead to a minimum, but I still want some overhead. I thought about automating many things, but that would defeat the whole point of raising awareness.

#The Root of the Problem

Ideally, we should fix problems at the root. But while we’re still figuring out what that root is, we can at least acknowledge the problem and address it as best we can.

I got tired of chasing the perfect solution and ending up with nothing actionable. I’d rather solve 50% of a problem than wait indefinitely to solve 100% of it.

The overhead I mentioned is one of those partial solutions. It doesn’t address the root cause of why my motivation fades, but it keeps me moving while I search for something better.

I’ve found that a 50% solution often leads to an 80% solution. You just need to be patient, stay humble, and remain willing to adapt.

Be water, my friend.

Photo by Ali Kazal on Unsplash