We live in a world where doing more is celebrated, and doing less is looked down upon.
The employee who manages the most clients or works on the most projects typically gets attention for being a “hard worker.” The athlete who trains a few hours every day and does extra recovery gets celebrated as “disciplined.” The parent who has their kids involved in sports, music, and social activities is considered a “good parent” because they’re investing in their children.
But does doing lead to success and happiness? The truth is they don’t.
Busyness leads to stress, burnout, reduced productivity, decreased creativity, and poor decision-making.
It makes us worse!
Worse still, studies show that over 60% of people are too busy to enjoy life.
Can you imagine spending your life constantly doing more to achieve happiness while letting your life pass you by? That’s how most people are living. They get caught in “the grind”
What’s with all the busyness?
There is an interesting study done by Leidy Klotz on the subject. (here is a nice summary if you want to read the whole thing). That revealed that our default is to add rather than subtract to solve problems.
TL;DR
Klotz was building a Lego bridge with his son and had an issue where the ends were uneven and the bridge couldn’t connect. Klotz wanted to make his side taller, but his son made his side smaller by subtracting blocks. This realization made Klotz wonder if the same thing happened with engineers when facing problems. He ran a study and found that almost everyone solved problems by adding rather than subtracting.
He then did this study with everyday activities and found the tendency continued. Most interesting to me, was when it came to strategic planning. Meaning coming up with a plan for the future success of an organization. Out of 750 ideas for change, less than 10% suggested taking away.
That’s because adding typically has an immediate impact. Adding makes us feel like we are doing more because it provides an immediate tangible return. Whereas subtraction typically has a negative experiential impact.
For example, if you say “I want to improve my health” you could say “I’m not going to eat after 7 pm” or you could say “I’m going to lift weights every day.
The first feels negative and like you’re losing something. You might even feel hungry in the evenings. In the second, you go to the gym, lift, and feel sore. You immediately feel like you’re doing something positive to impact your health.
But is there anything we can do to avoid this trap?
How to reduce busyness
What stood out to me in the Klotz experiment is that his son defaulted to removing blocks whereas Klotz wanted to add. This indicates busyness and addiction is a learned behavior, not an innate behavior.
That means we can rewire our brains to subtract and reduce busyness!
There are many ways to be intentional about subtraction, and doing less to achieve more and enjoy life, but I want to share a few tools to help you that I use in my own life:
Avoiding Daily Busyness
Daily: The “Two Do” List
The “Two Do” List is a tool I use when I feel like my day is getting extra full. It’s exactly what it sounds like it is. It’s a list of two, and only two, items I plan to address that day. It forces me to prioritize the highest leverage items and focus on those.
Ultimately, it helps me be more productive and complete more high-leverage tasks than trying to multitask and do more.
Weekly: Defining “Key Workouts”
If you’re an athlete, you know every workout can’t be a key workout. We need to vary intensities to progress and improve over time, or we risk burnout or injury.
I like to choose 2-3 “Key workouts” days each week. They’re the days that I’m going to put in 8-12 hours of work and grind. There are days I may need to do a shorter workout and not see friends, but by doing “key workouts” on specific days, I create “rest days” to enjoy life and recover from the others.
Vary intensities in your week.
Seasonally: Create “Training Plans”
You can’t be good at everything. You have to choose your suck.
You also can’t work to improve everything all at once. You have a finite amount of willpower. If you try and lose weight, get a new job, start a new relationship, and start a new hobby all at the same time you won’t get very far at any of them, but if you pick one goal and devote 12-16 weeks towards accomplishing it, you will achieve far more success.
Select one goal per quarter or season, and let that be your north star.
Yearly: Misojis & must-go-sees
Each year I like to have two items define my calendar: a Misoji, one big accomplishment or achievement that defines my year, and a “must-go-see”, one being an experience or season of rest.
This year was my Ironman 70.3 (misogi) and my month in Portugal (must-go-see)
Make sure you have seasons of work and deep seasons or rest built in throughout the year. Those are the “big rocks” we should be building our years and lives around.
I wrote an article on misogis & must-go-sees you can read here.
