'Do less'—the wisdom of subtraction

How to tackle Everything™

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Weeks ago, I stomped into my therapist’s office in a state of distress—frazzled, burned out, underwater. I barely set down my purse before spewing a frenzied tirade about how impossible it is to keep up with Everything™.

Everything™ consists of (but is not limited to)—

• WORK! So much work

• Personal passion projects which are also work (like this newsletter, the novel I’ve been writing in much of my free time for the better part of three years, and my nagging compulsion to pitch editors for supplementary freelance commissions)

• Social commitments

• Exercise and getting fresh air (I need both regularly lest I fully surrender to mental illness)

• Time to rest and recuperate

• Mental health/therapy (this overlaps with other things on the list but deserves its own bullet point)

• Keeping in touch with friends and family (which sometimes includes an unyielding torrent of digital communication across messaging, email, and social media apps)

• Reading—(Before you say this is indulgent: Reading is essential for pleasure, for staying informed, for intellectual stimulation, and for professional development; to quote Stephen King, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”)

• Grooming, hair care, hygiene

• Leisure (Also overlaps with other things here; I have a separate post in drafts about how leisure is a third, semi-active pursuit—between work and rest—and is essential to well-being)

• The administrative drudgery of adulthood e.g.,—

  • Housework

  • Laundry

  • Cooking

  • Groceries

  • Dealing with bills and chatting/calling customer service re: various things

  • Making/going to appointments—doctors and other

It all adds up. Everything™ demands attention all of the time. (And I’m blessed with a partner who does more than their fair share).

Often, work gobbles most of my energy for the week and then the essentials of writing, hygiene, exercise, chores, and the bureaucracy of existence lap up the remaining scraps of my capacity. And I don’t even have kids! How are parents keeping their children alive amidst Everything™? Surely they deserve trophies and accolades (or rather, they deserve better systemic support, but that’s a topic for its own newsletter).

It’s a miracle that working, non-wealthy grown-ups ever find prolonged periods of peace. And it’s clear to me why the 1% outsource to staff and assistants much of the daily minutiae and toil that slowly eats away at us plebes. (I’d likely do the same if given the chance.)

For some context, I delivered the Everything™ diatribe to my therapist during one of my busiest weeks at work—a week-long virtual summit that I market and moderate on top of my other duties—and overlaying the summit responsibilities over my regular job leaves me gasping (which is not to malign the summit itself which is a fun event with smart guest panelists).

Not every week brings me to the brink, but the ebbs and flows are familiar enough to lay bare that the way I’m managing life’s balancing act is untenable. (And as an ADHDer, I am particularly prone to overwhelm.)

Typically, when stress reaches a fever pitch, I cope by doubling down on the little things that make up the gurgling monster that is Everything™. I grit my teeth, open up my calendar, and block out a spate of new routines, habits, and workflows, convinced this will be the time I finally wrestle life to the ground. My impulse is to add, not subtract.

This rite of addition is a reflex. When I’m reeling, feeling out of control, a little voice whispers: You’re not doing enough. If you can just try a little harder, everything will get easier. And, sure enough, the color-coated plans I put in my calendar—for all the writing I will do, and tasks I will accomplish, and self-improvement I will master—do soothe me. Temporarily.

Then, when I inevitably can’t keep up with the grand designs that I’ve fed into the insatiable, gaping maw of Everything™, the pageantry of rainbow-colored tasks and systems in my Google calendar no longer offers relief. I begin to fall short; things start to slip through the cracks. Every small lapse becomes a reminder of a promise I’ve broken to myself. The compounding guilt bucks and rears, wreaking havoc.

And the cycle restarts:

Burnout —> the adding of more things → the temporary relief —> the fall from grace —> more burnout—> total shutdown —> repeat.

To give myself some credit: Over time, as my relationship with Everything™ has matured, I’ve learned to set more realistic goals, break up big projects into smaller chunks, say NO more often, block out time for rejuvenation, and prioritize and manage my time much better. And I have an arsenal of (somewhat) effective tools for dealing with overwhelm. But still, even as I’ve evolved how I deal with the additions—I’ve never questioned the validity of the addition itself. When the going gets tough, I add, add, add, hoping a new system will crack the code.

Some very good advice

After listening patiently to my tear-stained brain dump about the consuming tyranny of Everything™, my therapist looked at me kindly and said the following words of advice as a clinical matter of fact: “Amy, I think you need to do less.”

Given my lengthy preamble, you may have rightly guessed that I was unable to comprehend this advice. I winced—not from a late afternoon sunbeam that strobed through the window into my eyes—but from bewilderment.

“What do you mean less?” I asked. Hadn’t she been listening? There was so much to do. That was the whole problem: Too much Everything™—not enough time.

“I mean, do less,” she said.

Sweating in the sunlight, I blinked in her general direction with the naked idiocy of a newborn. Obviously, my simple mind needed clarification.

She explained, “Choose the things that you can let slide, the things that don’t matter as much, and try just not doing them.”

I stammered, slack-jawed.

“But, um, how exactly?”

“Well, some of the things you normally do?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t do those things.”

“And, like, then what?”

“And then nothing. You continue not doing the things that don’t matter so you have energy for the things that do.”

More silent, moronic blinking from me. The sun was now behind a cloud, no longer blinding me, which you might think meant I could finally see the wisdom of her words. But haha, no, sadly I was not using the sun as metaphor, just as a fun supporting character in this story.

I’d like to tell you my limp synapses finally sputtered to attention and the exchange ended there—but alas I cannot.

The circular conversation dragged on: She continued to explain an easy concept to me in simple English—a concept a chimp could understand. And I continued to respond with the grasping, dumbfounded stare of a toddler at the opera.

It wasn’t until after I’d left her office that I started to process where I was getting stuck. Mostly, I was anxious. Her advice rang a bell in a deep part of my psyche, in the pit of intuition, and I knew it needed exploration. Truth that warrants change is scary.

In the past, I’d improved some aspects of Everything™ by breaking goals down into smaller steps and giving myself more time to accomplish them, which helped to a point. This was the kind of advice I was expecting—some kind of “hack” for doing more. Not a blanket directive to do less. I was surprised by how subversive it felt to even consider the advice.

I’ve always framed productivity as a growth process, meaning I assumed it must expand by way of adding tasks and systems. Partially, this comes from the Puritan “hard work” ethos that holds laboring and suffering as virtuous, ideas which are very much alive in the American spirit. And partially it comes from a million other things (some of which are connected to growing up a misunderstood kid with ADD who was told by lots of adults that I should always be doing more and trying harder). Whatever the source, I’m shocked by how much I’ve internalized the belief that overwork is a moral imperative.

I realized: Part of me believes that if I do less, it might mean I am lazy, bad, even sinful. This stuff runs deep. Which is all the more reason to cut it out at the root.

Two takeaways

Don’t wait. Do less now.

The truth is, I’ve known that I want to “do less,” in my therapist’s words, for a long time. I’ve been trying to pare down my obligations to create room for what matters most (writing + physical and mental health). But I’ve been operating under the false assumption that the ability to do less is a prize that I will win in some mythical future when I finish paying penance in the present.

My approach has been: Do more now so you can do less later. I’m starting to understand that this premise is flawed.

A better approach is: Do less now to generate sustainable energy for the foreseeable future.

Oliver Burkeman, in a recent edition of his newsletter The Imperfectionist, describes doing less now as, “operating from sanity.” He defines sanity broadly as “what it feels like to live the kind of life you want to be living,” and he warns that “striving towards sanity never works. You have to operate from sanity instead.”

Burkeman writes:

“The basic principle in operation, as far as I can grasp it, is this: if you treat sanity as something you have to get to, by doing a lot of preparatory things first, the main effect will be to reinforce the sense of its being out of reach. You might get plenty of useful things done along the way, but you won’t reach peace of mind – because you’ll effectively be telling yourself, on a daily basis, that peace of mind is off in the distance, and never available here.

Operating from sanity, by contrast, means embodying a certain orientation toward life now, first, then doing stuff – rather than doing the stuff in an effort to attain the orientation. The crucial point is that it has to be now, not next year, and not even in a few hours’ time.”

I’ve been slowly taking this to heart—and I already feel lighter. When Everything™ snarls, I’ve been snarling back, opting out of some of its worst parts, and giving myself permission to prioritize things that I want right now.

It’s all about choice.

In my cycles of burnout, catastrophic meltdowns usually occur after a period of things slipping through the cracks and me crumbling under the ensuing chaos and shame of not doing enough. Turns out, an inevitable consequence of overload has always been me doing less. But it has felt like the “less” was happening to me, an unwilling subject. I haven’t been choosing less; it’s been choosing me.

I’d become so disconnected from my agency over my life, that every bullet in the list of Everything™ had the pall of obligation—even the things I once wanted to do. The moment something feels like a “should,” it becomes a drag. And unconsciously, I was attaching a big ol’ “should” to every single line item. But not anymore.

These last few weeks I’ve learned: The wisdom of subtraction hinges on choice.

It’s been empowering to consider my therapist’s advice under a new lens of agency. It’s a reframe. I am not letting things slip away. I am choosing what to do and what not to do. And in doing so I am building self-trust, reminding myself that I am capable of deciding what matters and what doesn’t, societal noise and social conditioning be damned.

More and more, I’m asking myself: What are the non-negotiables, the things that are essential to my overall welfare? And I’m trying to choose those things first.

If my well-being is a garden, then it’s up to me to pick the weeds that are suckling precious resources away from my growth and vitality. This can mean rearranging to-dos to make space when needed. And it can also mean taking things off the board completely to ensure I am investing my time in what keeps me happy, healthy, and alive.

It’s a process but I’m accepting that Everything™ will always be looming; it’s an immortal greed goblin. While it is co-created by us and by very real external pressures, some of which we can’t mitigate or eliminate, we can alter the monster’s size and influence by making choices that move us closer to the life we want to live.

Doing less is scary. Addition has been a habit as long as I can remember. But when habits no longer serve us, it’s time to break free. I’m excited about what I might gain as I learn to subtract. Who’s with me?