Any% Real Life: What Happens When You Try to Speedrun Your Morning Routine

It started, as most great disasters do, with a spreadsheet.

A guy on Reddit — let's call him what he called himself, "RouteOptimizer99" — posted a detailed breakdown of his morning routine, complete with a flowchart, a timer overlay, and a list of "skips" he'd discovered that cut his shower-to-out-the-door time from 34 minutes to 19 minutes flat. He had eliminated what he called "redundant loops" (making coffee and then going back to the bedroom to get his wallet was a routing error). He had optimized his breakfast into a single-item loadout for maximum caloric efficiency per second spent eating. He had, essentially, treated his own life like a video game he was trying to beat as fast as possible.

The post got 47,000 upvotes. Hundreds of people asked for the spreadsheet.

Welcome to the world of real-life speedrunning, where the obsessive optimization culture of gaming has leaked out of the monitor and into the kitchen, the gym, the job market, and apparently, the dating scene. Whether this is a stroke of genius or just anxiety with a leaderboard is genuinely up for debate.

How Speedrunning Thinks

For the uninitiated, speedrunning is the practice of completing a video game as fast as possible, often by exploiting glitches, skipping intended content, and finding routes the developers never anticipated. A speedrunner doesn't experience a game the way a normal player does — they see it as a system full of inefficiencies waiting to be broken. Every cutscene is dead time. Every required action is a potential skip waiting to be discovered. Every world record is just a baseline to destroy.

The community is enormous, obsessive, and genuinely impressive. Watching a skilled speedrunner dismantle a classic game is like watching a chess grandmaster play — the depth of knowledge is staggering, and the execution is almost violent in its precision.

But here's the thing about spending thousands of hours training your brain to see systems as optimizable: your brain doesn't turn that off when you close the game.

Sequence Breaks at the Grocery Store

Talk to anyone deep in speedrunning culture and you'll hear the same confession, delivered with varying degrees of self-awareness: they can't stop routing things.

Streamers describe mapping grocery store layouts to eliminate backtracking. One competitive runner described redesigning his laundry workflow after identifying what he called a "major time loss" in the transition between washer and dryer — he'd been "wasting movement" by folding clothes in the wrong room. Another talked about analyzing her commute for weeks until she found a "wrong warp" — a counterintuitive route that looked longer on a map but consistently shaved four minutes off her drive due to traffic light timing.

None of these people think this is entirely normal behavior. They're aware of what's happening. They just can't stop, because once you've seen inefficiency, you can't unsee it, and fixing it scratches a very specific itch that nothing else quite reaches.

"It's the same dopamine hit," one streamer explained during a recent stream. "You find the skip, you execute it perfectly, the timer drops — whether that's in a game or in making eggs, my brain doesn't really care. The reward is the same."

The Job Hunt Any% Category

Where things get genuinely fascinating — and a little chaotic — is when speedrun logic gets applied to high-stakes real-world activities.

Job hunting, it turns out, has a surprisingly active optimization community. Career-focused Discord servers and subreddits have developed what are essentially routing guides: sequences for applying to jobs, following up, and scheduling interviews that minimize time-to-offer. Users share "glitches" — unconventional tactics that skip expected steps and get results faster. Applying directly to a hiring manager instead of through the portal? That's a wrong warp. Getting a referral before you even apply? That's a sequence break. Identifying which companies have the shortest interview pipelines and targeting those first? That's route selection.

The language is completely borrowed from gaming, and the people using it are completely serious.

One job seeker documented her "any% job hunt" — finding employment as fast as possible with no constraints on method — on a popular productivity forum. She finished in eleven days. She also described the process as "the most exhausting thing I've ever done" and admitted she needed a week to recover, which is not typically how people describe a successful life strategy but is absolutely how speedrunners talk after a world record attempt.

Dating on a Timer

And then there's the dating category, which is where even the people doing it admit things get a bit unhinged.

Optimized dating — running through apps, conversations, and first dates with the explicit goal of reaching a meaningful connection in minimum time — has a small but vocal community of practitioners. The logic is sound on paper: identify inefficiencies, eliminate small talk that doesn't yield information, establish compatibility faster, move to the next stage sooner. Treat the whole process like a routing problem with a clear end goal.

The execution, predictably, is a mess. Real humans are not cooperative speedrun subjects. They don't follow expected routes. They introduce random elements that break any carefully planned sequence. They have their own optimization agendas that conflict with yours. The "any%" approach to romance tends to produce first dates that feel like intake interviews and second dates that never happen.

"I kept trying to skip cutscenes," one person wrote, describing a string of dates that went nowhere despite seeming efficient on paper. "Turns out the cutscenes were kind of the whole point."

Is This Genius or Just a Coping Mechanism with Good Branding?

Here's the honest answer: both, and the line between them is thinner than a frame-perfect input.

Applying systems thinking to real-world tasks is genuinely useful. Identifying redundant steps in your routine, optimizing high-frequency activities, finding unconventional routes to conventional goals — these are legitimate productivity skills that speedrunning culture has developed to an unusual degree of sophistication. The grocery store routing guy probably does save real time. The job hunter who treats her search like a speedrun probably does land offers faster.

But speedrunning also has a shadow side that maps uncomfortably well onto modern anxiety: the inability to simply experience something without optimizing it, the compulsive need to beat your own time, the quiet misery of treating every moment as a potential time loss. When you're speedrunning your morning routine, you're not really experiencing your morning — you're executing it. There's a difference, and it matters.

The speedrunning community itself, to its credit, is pretty self-aware about this. Many runners describe the hobby as a way to impose order and mastery on something controllable when the rest of life feels chaotic. The game becomes a space where optimization is rewarded and the rules are fixed. Real life, of course, is neither of those things.

The Real World Record

Maybe the most speedrunner thing you can do is recognize when you're in a category that can't be won on time. Some runs aren't about going fast. Some of them — the long ones, the ones with all the side quests and the slow moments and the cutscenes you can't skip — are the ones worth playing.

RouteOptimizer99 posted a follow-up to his morning routine breakdown six months later. He'd abandoned most of the optimizations. "Turns out," he wrote, "I kind of liked making coffee slowly."

The post got 61,000 upvotes. Nobody asked for that spreadsheet.