How To Apply Moore’s Law To Improve Your Life

Moore’s Law is 50 years old, and it’s generally applied to describe improvements in computing. But what happens when you apply its principles to your daily life?

Moore’s Law is, as you probably know, not so much a “law” as it is an observation, usually stated as follows and credited to Intel’s Gordon Moore:

The number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.

Which, as it stands, is pretty lousy advice to live your life by, unless you happen to be some kind of humanoid android. Which you’re probably not.

The reason why Moore’s Law isn’t actually a law is that it was an observation that became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it spurred processor makers to additional effort in the belief that if they didn’t act, their competitors would, and as a result, they’d fall badly behind in that particular field of technology. They were consistently iterating in order to stay relevant.

That’s part of Moore’s Law that you can bring to any particular field of endeavour, because it’s to do with spurring yourself on for regular actions over a period of time. That’s the logic behind any given fitness training regime, most of which don’t in fact run for two years, because at the end of such regimes, you should be considerably more fit and able to do more (processing, in Moore’s Law terms) in the same space of time.
That fits into just about any productivity system you’d care to name, from GTD to Pomodoro, all of which rely on the idea of a regular schedule to improve productivity.

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The other pertinent factor in Moore’s Law is the end result: More processing power. That’s something that you can apply to any given fitness scheme to gain the maximum benefit out of the smallest increments of time.

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Moore’s Law has also enabled chip makers to produce lower power chips with higher performance. There isn’t an exact human analogue for that… maybe.

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Finally, it is worth keeping in mind that while Moore’s Law has allowed for incredible leaps in computer processing ability, you’re still a human being, and as such, you shouldn’t absolutely obsess over saving small fractions of time.