Local optimization

One part of your setup gets faster while the whole thing gets slower, costlier, or riskier.

You switched to grocery delivery to kill the Saturday store run, and it worked: 90 minutes back every week, no parking lot, no cart. Then Wednesday you drive out because they swapped your cilantro for parsley. Thursday the chicken arrives two days from expiring, so you cook it that night instead of Sunday. Friday a bag of spinach nobody planned for goes in the trash. The store trip is gone. The kitchen has never felt more chaotic.

Local optimization is a speedup in one piece that pushes cost, delay, or waste onto everything around it. The tell is a part with a clean scoreboard of its own while the number nobody tracks climbs: total hours, cleanup, spend, spoilage. Unnoticed, it reads as bad luck, since no single Wednesday errand looks like the app's fault. The smallest correction is to score the whole loop instead of the piece. For two weeks, log every minute you spend on food, every emergency trip, and everything you throw out, then set that against the old Saturday total. The fix is usually one narrow rule, like refusing substitutions, not abandoning the tool. It is a false alarm when the extra cost is a one-time learning curve, or when what you actually bought was never time.