I am not sure if immutability or optimality is the main thing behind people giving you advice in these cases. It could be that:
productivity: maybe the person believes that this is wrong axis to concentrate on, or that even if you want to concentrate on productivity then best way to improve it is to replace low gain tasks with high gain tasks, ie focus on quality not quantity
sleep: maybe the person believes that beyond some threshold easily met by not having ants and not drinking stimulants any further progress is mostly determined by things out of your control like genes, stressful situations in life, or hormones
retention: maybe the person believes the thing can be optimized a lot, but only through coordination, so as a singular actor you have no action available which could snap out everyone from bad equilibrium
I am not sure if immutability or optimality is the main thing behind people giving you advice in these cases. It could be that:
productivity: maybe the person believes that this is wrong axis to concentrate on, or that even if you want to concentrate on productivity then best way to improve it is to replace low gain tasks with high gain tasks, ie focus on quality not quantity
sleep: maybe the person believes that beyond some threshold easily met by not having ants and not drinking stimulants any further progress is mostly determined by things out of your control like genes, stressful situations in life, or hormones
retention: maybe the person believes the thing can be optimized a lot, but only through coordination, so as a singular actor you have no action available which could snap out everyone from bad equilibrium