Do Less, But Better

How to stop managing time and be truly productive

The concepts of time management and productivity are closely linked, but are they really the same thing? Are productive people simply those who manage time well, and does managing your time always result in you being truly productive?

The obvious answer is no. You can schedule every minute of your day in a flawless time management system and still end the day not having actually been productive. That’s because productivity isn’t actually about doing stuff. It’s about producing stuff. The clue is right there in the word. So we should be measuring productivity in terms of what we produce, not what we do. It’s possible to be doing things all day, without producing a single thing.

Then there’s the question of whether we can actually ‘manage time’, at all. Many would argue that time is not really a manageable asset. Time is what it is. There are 24 hours of it in a day. 365 days in most years. About 70–80 years in most lifetimes (if you’re lucky). Time can be used wisely or badly, but it can’t really be managed, at least not in the way many of us understand the term time management.

At the crux of most time-constraint problems is the idea that there are too many things to do and too little time to do them. So, understandably, most time management strategies focus on doing more things in less time. But there’s a perfectly viable alternative. We could do fewer things, in more time. And we’d probably do them better.

How (and why) I’m doing less, but better

I’m on a ‘do less, but better’ quest, and I’m mostly failing right now. I’m a working freelance writer with bills to pay, so I wrote about 12,000 words last week, and they weren’t the best words I’ve ever written.

They were mostly web content and sales pages and blog posts — and they were perfectly good versions of what they were, but that’s all they were. I wish I’d written one perfect 2000-word piece that had somehow changed the world, but I didn’t.

Doing less isn’t as easy as it sounds. Especially in a culture that respects volume, worships long hours, and sanctifies busyness. Our culture glorifies doing more, so that’s what we do. But I’m trying. I’m slowly editing the dross out of my life. And I’m motivated by the concepts I outline below.

There are some really good reasons to do less, in almost every area of your life. Here are just a few of them.

1. The law of diminishing returns

We make wildly inaccurate assumptions about whether we’re actually accomplishing more when we work more hours. On a small scale, of course, we are. We write more in an hour than we do in ten minutes. But do we accomplish more when we work a 60-hour week rather than a 40-hour week? Probably not.

Henry Ford is credited with the revolutionary idea of giving workers weekends off. It’s often assumed he was a champion of workers’ rights, but that’s not really the case. It’s generally believed that Ford advocating for shorter working hours was actually the result of research, and findings, on the law of diminishing returns.

Ford found that 40 hours a week was the optimal time workers should be working to ensure high levels of productivity and that working beyond that amount of time, resulted in ‘diminishing returns’ or less work being produced per hour.

And that was based on repetitive, assembly line work. If your work is creative and requires periods of reflection and deep thinking time, it’s probably a lot less. We work best when we build in time to recover. Top Medium writer and author, Benjamin Hardy, wisely gives this counter-intuitive snippet of advice:

“For best results: Spend 20% of your energy on your work and 80% of your energy on recovery and self-improvement.”

Which ties in (very loosely) to my next point.

2. The 80/20 rule

You’ve probably heard of the 80/20 rule, otherwise known as the Pareto principle, after the Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, realized, back in 1897, that 80% of Italy’s wealth was owned by 20% of its citizens.

No doubt this was a revolutionary discovery in 1897, which of course, is no longer surprising or accurate in a world where everyone has become painfully aware that the majority of wealth is always owned by the minority of the people.

The 80/20 rule isn’t really about an 80/20 ratio. The ratio varies, often showing up as 70/30 or 90/10, or something less neat and rounded. 1% of movies account for 80% of box office takings, and about 7% of websites receive about 80% of worldwide web traffic.

These days the 80/20 rule is most often referenced in relation to the fact that, in every area of life and business, the minority of our efforts produce the majority of our results. one of my 10 ebooks accounts for most of my sales. Three of my 100+ blog posts attract most of my traffic. My five top-performing stories here on Medium are responsible for the majority of my traffic, followers, and revenue on the platform.

The problem with Pareto’s principle is that it’s hard to game, or outmanoeuvre. You genuinely don’t know, until you publish, which books, blog posts, or stories are going to gain the most traction. You don’t know until you launch, which creative project is going to bring in most of your revenue, but once you do know, you can certainly try and manipulate things a little.

As a writer, if I get most of my revenue from one writing platform, magazine, or publication, I should keep producing work for that platform, magazine, or publication, at least for now. If one of my clients pays more than the others, I should pitch that client more ideas.

It applies to other areas too. If I get more joy and inspiration hanging out with just two or three of the people I know than all the others put together, I should hang out with them more. If there’s an intensive, ten-minute, daily strength training routine that claims to work better than an hour at the gym, I should give that a try.

I don’t know if you can ever cheat the 80/20 rule, but I know you can use it to do a little bit less, a little bit better.

3. The issues with multitasking

Part of doing less but better is the simple act of doing one thing at a time, preferably to the completion of one particular creative project (yes, creative people, I’m suggesting you complete one project before starting another, rather than working on five at once — crazy idea, right?).

Twenty-first-century humans tend to multitask, a lot. We see multitasking as desirable, and essential. We roll our eyes at the guy who can’t cook dinner while watching the kids. “He just can’t multitask”, we say, as if it’s a sad and possibly life-ruining affliction. Multitasking can be valuable, of course, in some circumstances. Let’s face it. If the average woman couldn’t cook dinner while watching the kids, generations of humans would have grown up not knowing what a hot dinner is.

That doesn’t mean multitasking on creative tasks is necessary, or desirable. One of the most well-known studies on multitasking was carried out at Stanford, in 2009, by a team led by Clifford Naas.

The researchers thought they would discover something ground-breaking about why some people appear to be so able to multitask, and others can only do one thing at a time. Maybe their brains are wired differently, or they’ve developed a systemized thinking process that allows them to focus on several things at a time.

The study found no such evidence. In fact, referring to the high multitaskers in the study, Eyal Ophir, the study’s main author, stated:

“We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it,”

Every test showed that the more the subjects were trying to multitask, the worse their overall performance was.

One serious problem for high multitaskers was that they were paying attention to everything at once and couldn’t filter out irrelevant information, even when they were clearly told which information was irrelevant. One test asked subjects to focus on shapes of one color and disregard shapes of another color. The low multitaskers were fine with this. The high multitaskers? Couldn’t do it. Nass concluded that high multitaskers are:

“… suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them.”

Therein lies the problem with multitasking. It’s distracting, and most of us don’t produce our best or most creative work when we’re distracted. We produce it when we get to focus fully on it. Those of us who have raised families will reluctantly admit, that the dinner was rarely cooked to perfection while we were distracted by the kids, and the kids were significantly more likely to draw on the kitchen wall with the purple marker pen while we were distracted by the dinner.

When it comes to consistently productive, creative work, mono-tasking is even more desirable. Once you’re doing something like a big writing project, if you jump back and forth between that and another project, you’re just disrupting your flow. So don’t try and multi-task. Do one thing at a time, and do it better.

4. Newton’s first law of motion

This is the law that states that an object in motion stays in motion. Sometimes, you’re the object. Once you’re in motion on a particular creative project, staying on task is important to forward motion. If you work on five different projects, for a day each week, you probably won’t make as much progress, in five weeks, on any given project, as you would if you focused on one thing for one week.

There’s a reason for this. In the book Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind Gretchen Rubin calls it the power of frequency. She points out that when you write frequently on one big project, you stay in flow, never forget where you are, and take the pressure off.

This is never truer than when you have a big project full of closely related ideas to finish: a book, a film script, or a series of related stories or articles. Working on one thing keeps you focused on the ideas relevant to that project (fewer creative projects, but more true creativity).

5. The power of your ‘one thing’

When I first came across the book The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, I was skeptical. Focusing on one thing, and one thing only, seemed completely impractical to me.

Curiosity got the better of me and I read the book. I discovered there’s more to identifying your one thing than I imagined. The question Keller and Papasan suggest you ask yourself is not a simple “What one thing should I do?” But rather:

“What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?’

That’s a very different question, and a more complex one. I’ve found it can’t be applied to every situation, but it works more often than you’d think. Sometimes if you look at a situation from every angle, there really is something you can do that makes everything else a little easier, or (if you’re lucky) unnecessary.

You can apply one thing to different areas of your life simultaneously. So you can be working on the one thing you need to do for business success, the one thing you need to do to improve your health, and the one thing you need to do to strengthen your relationship, all at the same time.

6. Or maybe your three things

This idea comes from Brian Tracy’s book Eat That Frog, and it applies to your work, rather than your life in general. Tracy suggests you take a list of all the tasks you do as part of your work day, and circle the most important, then the second most important, then the third most important (simple so far, eh?). Then get rid of all the rest (not so simple).

Those three things really are where you should be focusing your efforts. It should be possible to outsource, automate, or eliminate pretty much anything else. I’m finding that if there is anything you can’t outsource, automate, or eliminate left on the list, you should systemize the hell out of it so it takes a tiny amount of your time each day, week, or month.

7. What you nurture grows

FOMO and shiny object syndrome have us thinking the grass is always greener elsewhere, but we all know the truth: The grass is greener where you water it.

What you focus on grows. What you nurture grows. So focusing on the few things you want to grow and develop, whether that’s your body of work, your relationship, or yourself, just makes sense. Put all your time, energy, and creativity into fewer things, and you can’t help but become better at those few things.

8. Most things don’t matter

“Nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all.” ― Arthur Balfour

Balfour was making a bold statement there. To most of us, a few things do matter, but only a few. If you have 100 things on your to-do list, I can guarantee almost all of them don’t matter very much, and most don’t matter at all.

So decide. What doesn’t matter much, and what doesn’t matter at all? More importantly, what matters most? Do that, and do it exceptionally well.

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