On Learning to Do Less, Better

I have spent the better part of ten years finding out what happens when you try to do everything. The answer is: you do most things poorly, you are exhausted much of the time, and you have the persistent feeling, despite the constant activity, of not quite arriving at the life you were trying to get to. This is a recognisable condition. Most women I know have it, or have had it, or are in the process of recovering from it.

The counterintuitive discovery, when you start doing less, is that the things you keep matter more, not less. When you say no to five commitments, the sixth one — the one you kept — becomes the thing you actually show up to properly. Full presence is a limited resource, and it is only when you stop distributing it across everything that you have enough of it for something.

Where to start the subtraction

Begin with the commitments that generate the most energy expenditure relative to the value they return. Not all obligations are equal: some take four hours of your life and give you back something worth having. Others take two hours and return almost nothing except the relief of having fulfilled them. Learn to tell the difference, and start declining the latter.

The person who does fewer things better is not doing less than the person who does everything. She is doing everything that matters, at the quality that the things that matter deserve.

The skill of doing less is not the skill of being lazy. It is the skill of discernment: knowing what is worth your time and what is not, and having the confidence to act accordingly. This is harder than it sounds. The culture of busy tells us that the full calendar is proof of worth. It is not. It is often proof of the opposite: an inability to prioritise, or a reluctance to disappoint people, or a fear that if you slow down you will discover that you have nothing to be busy towards.

The subtraction experiment

There is a well-documented bias in human problem-solving toward addition. When we want to improve something — a process, a home, a schedule, a plan — we instinctively look for what to add rather than what to remove. Studies on this, published most prominently in Nature in 2021, found that people consistently overlooked subtraction as a solution even when it was more effective, and even when they were explicitly told that subtraction was an option. We are wired to improve by adding.

This bias has a particularly visible effect on the schedules of people who are trying to live better. The person who wants more time for reading adds a reading habit. The person who wants more calm adds a meditation practice. The person who wants more creativity adds a creative project to an already full week. Each addition is reasonable in isolation. Together they create a week in which the pursuit of a better life consumes the conditions in which a better life could actually be experienced.

The subtraction experiment: take the current week's schedule and ask, for each commitment and activity it contains, whether removing it would improve the week or worsen it. This is not the same as asking whether the activity is valuable. A workout is valuable and its removal might worsen the week. A weekly meeting is valuable and its removal might improve the week. Value and net effect on the week are different assessments. Make the second assessment rather than the first.

On the quality side of the equation

Doing less only achieves its stated purpose if what remains is done more fully. A schedule thinned of commitments but filled with distracted half-presence arrives at the same destination as the overfull schedule: the experience of time passing without being inhabited. The do-less philosophy is only as good as the do-better that accompanies it.

Full presence in a reduced number of activities is the operative mechanism. The dinner with one friend rather than the group dinner — not because group dinners are worse, but because the conversation you can have at a table for two is categorically different from the conversation you have while managing the social dynamics of eight. The single project given three hours of focused work rather than three projects given one hour each. The walk taken without the podcast — just the walk, the sound of it, the direction of it, the things noticed on the way.

The resistance to doing less is real and worth acknowledging. It feels like underperformance, like laziness, like the choice of the person without ambition. This feeling is an artefact of a culture that measures output rather than quality of engagement, that evaluates lives by what was accomplished rather than by how the accomplishing felt. The person who does fewer things more fully is not less ambitious than the person who does many things at partial attention. They are playing a different game with different metrics. The metrics they are playing toward — depth, presence, the specific pleasure of doing something well — are harder to display and harder to compare, which is part of what makes them worth having.

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