Smarter, Not Harder
Boomer Anderson
Boomer Anderson is the Founder of Decoding Superhuman. His mission is to elevate the human experience. Boomer is competitive by nature and was the youngest person to win the New Jersey State Barbeque Championship (pre-biohacking days). Boomer gave up his successful career in investment banking to pursue the entrepreneurial dream. Shortly after leaving finance, Boomer found out he had heart disease. He was 30. Boomer tabled the original idea and began reaching out to experts around the world to fix himself. Decoding Superhuman started to elevate human performance. The company works with entrepreneurs and executives to work “smarter, not harder”. Using lab tests, behavior change, and technology, Decoding Superhuman helps professionals leverage time to enjoy more of what they love. Boomer’s efforts and experiments are captured in The Algemeen Dagblad, Quantified Self Conferences, and as a guest lecturer on the future of food and performance at The Hotelschool The Hague.
Overwhelm leads to poor decision making. Not enjoying your work leads to unhappiness. Lack of time creates stress. In “Smarter, Not Harder,” Boomer Anderson presents his (sometimes tough) lessons learned on how to free your mind to think better, enjoy your work every day, and to create more efficiently so you have more time to spend on what you love.
The objectives are to create space, to create enjoyment, and create time. This can be both in your work as well as your personal life.
Summary
- Combat "bandwidth poverty" by offloading tasks into a mobile application and reframing them as specific, small physical actions categorized by context or energy levels. - Create evergreen work by using a personal knowledge management system to store research and answers, allowing for easy recall and the reuse of information in future projects. - Automate daily life and business processes by developing standard "plays" or routines, which ensures consistent results and makes it easier to delegate tasks to others. - Utilize automation tools and digital assistants to handle repetitive tasks like email management and data entry, freeing up time for high-priority activities and training. - Track time usage with digital tools to identify inefficiencies and conduct weekly reviews to reallocate focus, while prioritizing health as the ultimate foundation for performance.
Article
Smarter, Not Harder
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Boomer Anderson Made The Case That Productivity Was Never Just About Getting More Done
On a late autumn day in Helsinki, with the Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki running on equal parts caffeine, curiosity and the low electrical hum of self-optimization, Boomer Anderson stepped onto the stage with a promise that cut through the conference fog. His talk, **“Smarter, Not Harder,”** did not offer another sermon on hustle. It offered something rarer, and more humane: a blueprint for escaping overwhelm without sacrificing ambition.
Anderson, founder of Decoding Superhuman, arrived with the credibility of someone who had lived both the cult of performance and its cost. He had left investment banking after years of punishing schedules, only to discover at 30 that he had cardiovascular disease, including a dangerous blockage in his left anterior descending artery, grimly known online as the Widowmaker. That diagnosis changed the arc of his life. It also gave his argument moral force.
At the summit in Helsinki, Finland, on 1 November 2019, he spoke not as a detached productivity expert, but as a man who had learned that efficiency without health was a hollow victory.
The New Scarcity Was Not Time, But Capacity
The core of Anderson’s presentation was deceptively simple. The great crisis of modern work, he argued, was not merely a shortage of hours. It was a shortage of mental bandwidth.
“In the future, humans will need to make decisions faster and with more accuracy than ever before,” Anderson said during the session. “If you don't want to get left behind, you must focus on optimizing your performance and your day.”
He called the condition **“bandwidth poverty”**, a phrase that landed because it named a familiar but often invisible affliction. This was the state in which the mind became so crowded with obligations, choices and unfinished tasks that even beginning felt impossible. People were not failing because they were lazy. They were failing because the entry point to action had become too high.
To escape that trap, Anderson urged the audience to stop treating productivity as a test of endurance. The answer was not to push harder against a collapsing system. It was to redesign the system itself.
Why The To-Do List Had Become A Theater Of Failure
One of Anderson’s sharpest insights was his attack on the traditional to-do list. Most lists, he suggested, were not tools of clarity but monuments to abstraction. They contained sprawling ambitions such as reading a thousand-page book, booking international travel, or solving some large professional problem, all written as if naming a task were the same as making it actionable.
That was where paralysis began.
“Bandwidth poverty is when you have no capacity,” he said. “To escape it, you must lower your barrier to entry and reframe your tasks so that you can actually start getting things done.”
His prescription was practical and unsentimental. Every task had to be reduced to a **next physical action**. Not “prepare board meeting,” but “email finance team for revenue projections.” Not “get healthier,” but “schedule blood work.” The brain, in other words, needed specificity before it could offer momentum.
This reframing was not just about neatness. It was about physiology, emotion and relief. Anderson cited the calming effect of externalizing commitments, echoing the method popularized by productivity expert David Allen. In that move from vague burden to concrete action, the mind regained a measure of control.
Building An External Brain For Evergreen Work
If the first half of Anderson’s argument was about clearing space, the second was about making work matter for longer.
He spoke with particular urgency about the deadening repetition of knowledge work, where reports were written, questions answered and research assembled only to vanish into old folders and forgotten inboxes. Little wonder, he suggested, that workers became disengaged. If every task expired the moment it was completed, then labor began to feel disposable.
His alternative was what he called **evergreen work**: the deliberate creation of reusable knowledge assets. Research, answers, summaries and frameworks should be stored in a personal knowledge management system, organized so they could be easily retrieved and repurposed.
“Creating work that is evergreen and usable for the future makes your work more enjoyable,” Anderson said. “By organizing your knowledge, you ensure that every task you complete becomes a building block for your future success.”
It was a compelling reframing. The point was not simply to save time later, though it would. The point was to restore dignity and continuity to work that too often felt fragmented. Each task, if captured properly, became less a one-off demand than a future resource.
Life As A Series Of Plays
Anderson’s language shifted, at key moments, from the office to the playing field. A former athlete, he argued that routines, processes and delegated systems were all variations on the same principle. In business they were processes. In sport they were plays. In life, they were the repeated sequences by which standards were either preserved or lost.
“Your life is actually just a series of plays,” he told the audience. “If you organize these plays, you can automate your processes and perform with consistency, ensuring you deliver a high standard every single time.”
This was one of the talk’s most resonant ideas. In a culture that often romanticized spontaneity and improvisation, Anderson made the opposite case: freedom came from structure. If recurring tasks were documented, then they could be repeated under stress, improved over time, or handed to someone else without a drop in quality.
For founders, executives and exhausted professionals, that meant scalability. For everyone else, it meant less friction in the business of living.
The Tools Were Secondary, But They Mattered
Like any seasoned biohacker, Anderson knew his audience liked specifics. He supplied them generously, though always in service of a larger philosophy.
Task management apps such as Todoist could hold commitments outside the mind and organize them by context or energy level. A tag like “easy” or “10 minutes or less” allowed productivity to continue even after a bad night’s sleep. Blinkist could distill long business books into brief, consumable summaries. Unroll Me could tame subscription emails. Process Street could help turn a routine into a repeatable operating procedure. Upwork and similar services could bring in assistants for repetitive tasks. Alfred, TextExpander, IFTTT and Zapier could reduce digital friction. Timeular and RescueTime could reveal where the day had actually gone, rather than where one imagined it had gone.
Yet Anderson’s deeper point was that no tool could rescue a person from confusion if the underlying habits remained poor. Software was only useful once priorities were clear and systems were designed around real human limits.
Health Was The First Productivity System
Perhaps the most striking element of the presentation was that, despite all its practical advice on organization and automation, it refused to sever productivity from biology.
“Whether you are trying to reverse disease or optimize performance, there is an overlap of behavior modifications,” Anderson said. “All of your success is much more useful if you prioritize and optimize your health first.”
That line carried the weight of experience. Anderson’s biography, from Wall Street overwork to a life-altering diagnosis, hovered over the talk even when unspoken. He had once optimized for output while neglecting the body that made output possible. The lesson he brought to Helsinki was not anti-achievement. It was anti-delusion.
Health, in his framework, was not a lifestyle accessory. It was the foundation of cognitive sharpness, emotional resilience and sustainable performance. Track your time, yes. Automate your workflows, certainly. But if sleep, recovery and cardiovascular health were collapsing in the background, the whole architecture would eventually fail.
A More Humane Vision Of High Performance
What made Anderson’s session at Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki memorable was not merely its efficiency hacks, but its insistence that optimization should create more life, not consume it.
His goals, as he described them, were to create **space, enjoyment and time**. That was a notable choice of words. Space, not compression. Enjoyment, not just output. Time, not just speed.
In an era increasingly defined by decision fatigue, algorithmic pressure and the anxious performance of busyness, “Smarter, Not Harder” stood apart for refusing the old mythology that relentless effort was a virtue in itself. Anderson offered a different ethic, one in which the best systems lowered friction, preserved attention and protected health.
By the end of the talk, the message felt less like a productivity seminar than a quiet act of rebellion. The future, Anderson suggested, would belong not to those who crammed the most into the day, but to those who designed their days well enough to remain fully human inside them.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki