Does work really expand to fill all available hours?

That might be a perception issue. In a second effort (this week) to free up more time, I just invested half an hour to run an optimization experiment. Amazingly successful and I'll probably save 4-5 hours per week, for a month or more. Huge win, to be sure. Counting both efforts, I get 6-7 hours back.

The thing is, I didn't start really looking for optimizations until I passed a pain threshold. I expect that is pretty typical behavior for us all, and that really sucks for me, on a couple of levels.

First off is professional. Always optimizing stuff is part of the gig.

Second is just personal embarrassment, because missing a forehead-slappingly easy test for bias, is, well, personally embarrassing.

That bit of folk wisdom, that work expands to fill all available hours? Like much folk wisdom, not buying it. This was just the most recent iteration of the problem. I think it's much more about pain thresholds, and when we finally realize we can't fit that next Desired Thing into the schedule. Only then do we scurry off and find fixes for the problem.

Perhaps this a LifeHacking thing. Hard to tell: trying to follow whatever fashion is currently playing out on the Internet is usually an expertise in futility.

But I plainly need to lower my pain threshold, and optimize sooner.