Do less to do more
Early on in my career, I thought that the way I proved my usefulness was by raising my hand for everything. Any time something came up that I thought would make others around me happy, I quickly said “I can do that!”.
Over time, I learned an important lesson the hard way: saying yes to everything doesn’t make you more useful. In most cases, it makes you less useful.
What I began to realize was that, as I continued saying “yes” to more and more, my performance began to tank. Suddenly, I was struggling to focus on the task at hand. I’d often do a little of this, then a little of that, barely moving the needle anywhere. Eventually, I began to disappoint people, myself included. Deadlines were slipping, my quality of work was declining, and my satisfaction at work began to tank.
I felt like I was working unbelievably hard, and I was. The problem wasn’t lack of effort or intention. The problem was lack of results. That’s when I realized that the key to better performance and satisfaction lies within doing less, not more.
Doing less doesn’t mean doing the bare minimum or trying to get out of work. Doing less means learning to prioritize and then focus on the most impactful things.
Prioritization is the ability to determine what outcome is most impactful towards your desired goal. Focus is the ability to use your time and energy in service of the priority, cutting out the distraction and noise that would have you feeling busy, but ultimately deters progress on the priority.
A good way to illustrate this is to imagine a messy house. Every room is cluttered and disorganized. You are hosting a dinner party at your home later in the evening, and your stress spikes as you think of everything there is to do. You start in the kitchen, washing dishes and clearing off surfaces. When you go to put one of your children’s toys away in their room, you see clothes and crumbs all over their floor.
Your attention suddenly fixates on the crumbs and clothes. You start picking up the clothes, folding them up and putting them in drawers. Then, you go in search of the vacuum to get those crumbs. While searching for the vacuum, you see a bunch of random items left at the bottom of your stairs, right in the path that guests will walk by when entering your home to go to the kitchen. You quickly start scooping up the items on the stairs and walking around the home putting them away.
On and on this goes until, one hour in, your find yourself back in the kitchen. It pretty much looks exactly the same as it did before. You feel frustrated at the lack of progress, sigh, and sit down for a minute. After a moment, you start to realize that you can’t possibly get everything clean in time for your guests to arrive. So you lock in on the one area of the home that guests are actually going to be in for the dinner party: the kitchen/dining area.
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Within 45 minutes of dedicating all your attention to this one part of the home, it looks brand new. For the purpose of the dinner party, you’ve accomplished your mission. They have a clean and inviting space to come spend a couple of hours with you in. The other parts of the home will come when your priorities are different.
In life and especially at work, it can be tempting to try and fix all the things that feel broken. We can obsess over every detail and convince ourselves that everything matters. When this happens, we have to remember to take a step back, and broaden our perspective. We have to zoom out and remember the bigger picture, and then re-focus ourselves on what actually matters for the goal we have. If we don’t we run the risk of doing a lot, but producing very little.
Because we have a tendency to quickly lose sight of the big picture, it is important to intentionally structure our routine to force us to zoom back out. Some people hold space daily, first thing in the morning, to visualize what their goal is and their vision of the future. Some people hold an hourly weekly planning session where they structure their time for the next week to prioritize the most important things. All are valid, what matters is finding what works for you.
After reading a lot of books, getting advice from people better than me at this, and a lot of practice, here’s how I help myself prioritize and focus:
- At least once a week, I connect with the person I am trying to become. Usually on Sunday evenings, I sit down and write a letter to my future self, detailing who I hope they are and what they are doing. This helps me keep my actions and mindset now, in harmony with who I want to become.
- For work, I try to periodically set just one big goal that will bring my vision for my future to life. One big goal, that feels both scary and exhilarating at the same time. Scary because it’s a lot in an aggressive timeframe, and exhilarating because the idea of succeeding at it is inspirational to me.
- Once a week, I look ahead to the coming week and try to allocate my time towards the things most critical to achieve my goal. For example, I decided last month to start my own business. I have a goal for what I want to bill by the end of January, which means nothing else really can matter more right now than trying to get people to sign up as clients. So that’s where the majority of my time goes.
- I trained AI to be brutally direct with me every single morning to hold me accountable to my goal. It may sound silly, but this slap across the face every day is a reality check of where I’m at vs where I want to be, and forces me to confront reality and do what I said I was going to do.
For me, this approach has helped me prioritize and focus. I’ve historically struggled to think big picture, so I need structure that forces me to zoom back out. The weekly planning and daily AI check-ins help me be honest and intentional with the work I sit down to do.
Whether or not this approach is valuable to you, I hope the combination of prioritization and focus resonate with you. The how is less important than the what here. So long as you are practicing these principles, you will be able to achieve more by doing less.
