Doing Less to Accomplish More
It’s hard to see how anyone can find joy and satisfaction at work without radically reducing the number of things they’re actively working on. There’s a reason this comes after posts on prioritization, building a BS detector, and boundaries—as they are the precursors to doing less.
Prioritization and focus is important in a strategic sense, but it’s also just a way to actually get things done.
Peter Drucker writes that an effective executive “knows that he needs large chunks of time [to make progress on objectives] and that small dribblers are no time at all.” But when there are 20 things demanding our attention, there are often nothing but dribblers on our schedules.
In the book It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson helpfully reframe this problem as finding “quality hours” versus “fractured hours.” They write, “A quality hour is 1 × 60, not 4 × 15. A quality day is at least 4 × 60, not 4 × 15 × 4.”
That’s a helpful productivity tip, but it intersects with our joy and satisfaction at work because when we break up our time and attention, we don’t actually experience whatever little progress we make. And we all need that sense of I did something today to feel satisfied.
Radically prioritizing—taking on projects sequentially rather than in parallel—can also provide a sense of spaciousness. When we have multiple tasks pulling at us, it can often feel like we can never relax.
And when we can’t relax, it’s not just an emotional burden. Good ideas pop up in the shower for a reason.
However, the challenge I have seen for people who are trying to radically prioritize is that they forget the “radically” part of it. They try to take one or two things off their full plates, or eliminate just 1-2 hours of meetings. Because they nibble around the edges, it’s hard to get the emotional and productivity boost they desire.
Instead, we’re more likely to find the right “radical” solution by stripping our to-do lists down to the studs, and rebuilding from there. Tactically, that might look like:
Literally starting the to-do list from a blank sheet of paper (as opposed to an electronic list with the existing tasks staring us in the face)
Taking a hiatus from items 4 to 10 on our lists by postponing meetings related to them for a couple weeks as if we were on vacation from them
Carving out 1-5 mornings in the next couple of weeks that are dedicated to making rapid progress on whatever is highest priority (and hopefully eliminating them)
Putting a moratorium on any new projects until our current to-do lists is cut by 80%
The point here isn’t the specific tactics. Rather, it’s a suggestion to experiment with radical prioritization to see what it actually feels like to have a manageable workload. It’s about being able to confidently say to ourselves a statement like: “I know I can capably juggle 10 projects (or kids’ activities, home tasks, etc), but it only feels good when limited to only four at a time.”