The faint hum of the refrigerator was the only sound in the kitchen at 11:42 PM.

I was staring at a spreadsheet. Rows and rows of names. Dates stretching back six months.

Dead leads. Or so I thought.

We have this addiction to "new." We want the fresh kill. The new email notification. The dopamine hit of a stranger entering the funnel. But looking at those 300 ignored rows, I felt a knot in my stomach. I wasn't hungry for more; I was wasteful.

I stopped running. I started coding.

The Sluice Strategy

A sluice is a channel controlled at the head by a gate that washes ore to separate the heavy gold from the light earth.

It isn't about getting more dirt. It is about washing what you already have.

I opened Google Apps Script. I didn't need a fancy CRM or a monthly subscription tool. I just needed logic. I wrote a script to skim the sheet, check the date, and adjust the message based on the lead's status.

I hit run.

The results were jarring.

Out of 300 "dead" emails, I received 100 responses in forty-eight hours.

One in three.

It felt like finding a forgotten bank account. Some bought immediately. Others just thanked me for checking in.

The Etymology of Extraction

The word sluice comes from the Latin exclusa, meaning "a place to shut out water."

It’s a paradox. You have to restrict the flow to find the value.

If you are like me, you run past the gold because you are too busy looking for the mine. We overcomplicate sales. We think we need volume. But the history of the 1896 Klondike Gold Rush tells us something different. The people who got rich weren't the ones running frantically across the tundra; they were the ones who built systems to process the riverbed systematically.

The Optificing Protocol

Optificing is the proprietary algorithm of infinite growth that focuses on maximizing output from existing inputs through iterative refinement.

I realized I didn't need better leads. I needed a better sieve.

Here is the breakdown of the shift:

The Automaton's Advantage

There is a specific kind of arrogance in doing everything manually. We think our "personal touch" is magic.

It isn't. It's a bottleneck.

By automating the re-engagement, I didn't lose humanity. I gained the capacity to be human where it counted. The script handled the "Hey, are you still looking?" so I could handle the "Yes, and here is my problem."

Slowing down to build the system felt like losing time.

It was actually buying time.

The Reframe

The foundational reframe transforming my life is that systems are not cold; they are the vessel for connection.

When I stopped chasing and started sluicing, the gold appeared. It was there the whole time, buried under the sediment of my own busyness.

This is the practice.

Why does this matter?

Because you are likely sitting on a fortune you are too busy to harvest.

Follow along as I continue to walk this path.

I explore this in my AI trainings. DM me to learn more.

#optificing #automation #sales #systems #growth #fyp