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To be More Productive, Try Doing Less

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The top performers in every field tend to have one thing in common: they accept fewer tasks and obsess over getting them right.

If you’re struggling with time- and task-management, the solution is not to try to be even more productive by somehow “finding” time to do more things.

Time management advice tends to want you to believe that you aren’t doing enough with all that “extra time” you can unearth by squeezing out more from your time. You don’t need to commoditize every minute of your life and devote it to productive work.

You can’t—and shouldn’t—do it all

More time is not the answer to your time management problems.

You can’t manage time. You cannot control time. What you can control are your actions. You can control how you spend your time on what activities. You are in complete control of what you do and when you do it.

Jog through your list of things to do. For each task, ask,

  • Why is this task necessary?
  • What would happen a month from now if it isn’t done?
  • What would happen if this never gets done
  • Who wants this task done, and who is the right person to do it?
  • Do fewer things that create more value, rather than more things that are mostly empty.

Effective time management is about knowing what’s essential and what’s not. Don’t get disproportionately involved with small things while monumental things are to be done.

Idea for Impact: No point in doing something that doesn’t need doing.

The best way to get lots of things done is to not do them at all.

To get more done, you need to do less. Trying to do it all doesn’t work. In other words, do only those things that really matter. Focus on those activities that drive the most significant results.

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Stop Dieting, Start Savoring

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Research suggests that excluding entire food groups, banning your favorite foods, forcing yourself to count calories, and measuring success by a number on a scale may actually make you want to eat more. Restrictive dieting can slow your metabolism down, making it even harder to lose weight over the long term.

You’re more likely to be successful at keeping weight off if you lose weight gradually and steadily. Be more mindful of what you eat and how you eat.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your favorite foods and indulging in your cravings for cookies, potato chips, or ice cream. All you have to do is cut back. Practice awareness by slowing down and thinking about what you’re eating and why you’re eating it.

Don’t gulp your food; you’ll overeat before you realize that you’re full. Instead, rest between bites. Take time to chew your food thoroughly. You really don’t need as much food as you think you do.

When you eat out, keep your food-mindfulness on the right track. Keep hunger under control beforehand. Don’t skip meals. Control portion size. Share your meal or take half of it home.

Idea for Impact: Eating should be a pleasurable activity. No food is inherently good or bad, and there’s no need to build an adversarial relationship with food.

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Real Ways to Make Habits Stick

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Want to make a new habit stick? Try piggybacking or ‘stacking’ it to an existing one.

Choose something you have no problem motivating yourself to do—say, brushing your teeth—then combine it with some habit you want to acquire. The existing pattern serves as the prompt for the new habit.

Most people have robust morning and evening routines; try stacking new habits into those practices. For example, if you want to do some mindfulness meditation every day, do it after brushing your teeth in the morning. Your wake-up routine becomes the cue to build a new meditation habit.

Better yet, associate the habit you want to achieve with a ‘temptation’ (something you love doing,) like sipping your morning cuppa joe. Your habit stacking plan may look like this: “After I meditate for ten minutes, I will have my coffee.” This way, the habit will become more attractive to you, making it more likely to stick.

Idea for Impact: Good habits build automatically when you don’t have to consciously think about doing them. Look for patterns in your day and think about how to use existing habits to create new, positive ones. Stacking habits can encourage you to remember, repeat, and, therefore, maintain a series of behaviors. Set yourself up for success.

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The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

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Even the more determined souls among us find that New Year’s resolutions aren’t effective.

Some of us don’t even bother making New Year’s resolutions anymore because we always break them. Mark Twain famously wrote in a letter to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in January 1863,

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual … New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.

When we try to change everything at once, we set ourselves up for failure

We make bold resolutions to start exercising or losing weight, for example, without taking the steps needed to set ourselves up for success. Behavioral scientists who study habit formation argue that most people try to create healthy habits in the wrong way. Starting a new routine isn’t always easy.

Stanford University researcher B. J. Fogg, the author of Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019,) notes that jumping cold turkey into new beginnings upon the turn of the calendar demands a high level of motivation that can’t be sustained over time. He recommends starting with tiny habits to help make the new habit as easy and achievable as possible in the beginning.

Small Measures, Large Results

Small, specific goals are amazingly effective. Making a New Year’s resolution to “run a marathon this summer” is an imposing aspiration to get started on, but committing to “run two miles in 30 minutes thrice a week in January” is a first operating objective.

Break any big challenge into simple steps and just focus on getting to the first step. Taking a daily short stroll could be the beginning of an exercise habit. Then, regroup and think about step two.

The truth is, if you invest time and have even a little bit of success in any endeavor, you’re both more likely to believe the changes will last and commit more. Success builds momentum.

Idea for Impact: Good habits happen when we set ourselves up for achievable success.

Bold promises and vague goals don’t work well. Neither does beating up on yourself for lapses.

Make New Year’s resolutions by establishing long-term targets and making many small resolutions all year round. If you want to lose weight, resolve to pass up nacho-and-cheese and soda for a month.

Take one baby step at a time. Expect some setbacks. The willpower necessary will be small. And you’ll get better results that’ll actually stick.

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  4. Don’t Try to ‘Make Up’ for a Missed Workout, Here’s Why
  5. A Worthwhile New Year’s Resolution

Don’t Over-Measure and Under-Prioritize

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There’s a difference between what you can measure and what you must prioritize.

If you let the data drive the process, you’ll end up with an abundance of metrics that you don’t really know what to do with. Don’t build metrics based on what is easy to measure instead of measuring what matters.

While you might want to track many metrics, you need to prioritize a few of them—just the ones that matter most for your team. Start with strategic goals, and frame the data collection and analysis around those goals. Be clear about these goals in your internal communications.

Idea for Impact: The more you measure, the less prioritized you can be. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to measure everything. Focus on developing reliable metrics and models that consistently link the data to your team’s performance. Measure what matters.

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  5. Be Careful What You Count: The Perils of Measuring the Wrong Thing

Plan Your Week, Not Your Whole Life

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Don’t set unrealistic expectations for yourself. No matter how ambitious and eager you are, no matter how talented you are, there’s a limit to how much you can “produce” in a given time. Moreover, even if you get 24 hours to work, you’re restricted by the amount of energy you’ll have.

Much of long-term planning is guesswork or an expectation of the continuation of prevailing trends. The future can’t be predicted with absolute certainty. At the most, you can be somewhat confident about what might happen in the next few weeks or the upcoming months.

Idea for Impact: Plan Weekly, Review Daily

You can’t identify a precise point in the long-term future and then work yourself from here to there. You’ll be better off if you explore like the Italian navigator Columbus, and just head in a general westerly direction. In other words, have a long-term orientation but operate with medium-term plans. Restrict yourself to a few but significant quarterly goals.

Each week, develop weekly milestones that contribute to the quarterly goals. And each day, schedule 15 minutes to go over your progress and fractionate weekly objectives to daily working goals.

Life is unpredictable, and it is great to have some big things planned out, but not your whole life. A fine-grained approach to goals and planning can help you adapt quickly for survival and success.

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  4. Numbers Games: Summary of The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller
  5. Master the Middle: Where Success Sets Sail

Invite Employees to Contribute Their Wildest Ideas

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When Hewlett-Packard (HP) Norway appointed Anita Krohn Traaseth managing director in 2012, she implemented a “speed date the boss” program. She invited every employee from every organization level for an informal, five-minute conversation based on three themes. She encouraged people to bring their big ideas on innovating individually and collectively.

  • Who are you, and what do you do at HP?
  • Where do you think we should change, and what should we keep focusing on?
  • What do you want to contribute beyond fulfilling your job responsibilities? Or, do you have a talent or skill you don’t get to use now in your position?

Everyone’s an Innovator: Ramp up creativity with your frontline employees

Krohn Traaseth’s initiative defined the roadmap for her tenure. It pushed HP to become one of Norway’s top workplaces within three years. HP Norway improved every major organizational performance measure, such as staff turnover, customer satisfaction, top-line growth, and bottom-line performance.

Not only that, her discussions uncovered that there were 30 skilled musicians on her payroll. HP Norway formed a band, which played live to 1,800 company executives in Barcelona in 2013, gaining better visibility to her Norwegian outpost.

Following Krohn Traaseth’s success, other HP divisions and employers have now introduced the concept of ‘Speed Date the Boss’ initiatives in other countries.

Idea for Impact: Value the frontline people in your organization as talented assets, not cheap cogs.

Krohn Traaseth’s program was so successful because, as the top boss, she showed that she was willing to listen. She also openly modeled her willingness to listen to her management teams and foster their engagement.

  • When employees see the boss willing to receive honest feedback and no one’s head rolls, they’re more likely to speak up.
  • Soliciting ideas directly from employees individually, rather than holding brainstorms, takes the edge off group dynamics. Group settings aren’t where all employees feel free to share their best–and bold—ideas.
  • Rank-and-file employees can be a great source of innovation if only their leaders listen to them. Organizational innovation doesn’t have to trickle top-down or emanate from the R&D team. The best way to produce great ideas is to start by generating many ideas. Encourage everyone on your team to think, contribute, and participate.

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'Good Enough for the Bastards' by Anita Krohn Traaseth (ISBN B00MVXFK4K) PS: Anita Krohn Traaseth is now the CEO of Innovation Norway, a state-sponsored project focused on promoting innovation and economic development. She’s the author of Good Enough for the Bastards (2014,) a Norwegian version of Sheryl Sandberg‘s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013.)

Cf: See my guide on preparing an action plan at a new job by collecting the expectations of all the people with whom your new role interacts.

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Focus on Rituals, Not Goals

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My biggest takeaway from James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018) is the importance of shifting your focus from your end goal to what your need to do regularly to reach that goal.

Though goals can provide orientation and motivation, Clear notes that committing to the system makes all the difference. Goals aren’t necessarily the best way to ensure things are done. Thinking about only goals tends to make people believe, “I’m not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goal.” This impedes their long-term progress.

Instead, Clear recommends centering on the routines and things you need to do regularly to reach the goal. For example: If you’re a swim team coach, and your goal is to win a championship, the system that you should focus on is training every day, “You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

Idea for Impact: A systems-first mentality beats a goal-oriented mindset. “Fall in love with the process rather than the product.”

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  4. Big Shifts Start Small—One Change at a Time
  5. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes

Why Sandbagging Your Goals Kills Productivity

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Sandbagging is managers believing they can accomplish more if they lower the bar and set goals their team can easily hit. Sure, managers often purposely set comfortable goals so that there’s room for “under-promise and over-deliver.”

Setting low goals may appear a clever strategy, but it’s a recipe for underperformance. Sandbagged goals don’t demand much in the way of performance when managers already know precisely how their teams will achieve the goals.

However, sandbagging can let teams down. Under-setting goals actually does what it’s created to avoid—teams eventually find such easy goals boring and demotivating. Low goals require little and inspire less, and ultimately undercut productivity. According to this study by Chancellor University’s Steve Kerr and Douglas Lepelley, when goals are fixed “too low, people often achieve them, but subsequent motivation and energy levels typically flag, and the goals are usually not exceeded by very much.”

Idea for Impact: To generate the greatest levels of effort and performance, set demanding goals outside your team’s comfort zone, but not so challenging and unattainable as to break your team’s morale. Aiming to achieve extraordinary things—hitting the farthest target and missing—can often be more worthwhile than successfully hitting a easy target.

Wondering what to read next?

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  3. Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize
  4. Intentions, Not Resolutions
  5. The Trouble with Targets and Goals

You’ll Overeat If You Get Bigger Servings

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So many diets, so little evidence that they work. Many of the better plans boil down to basic strategies: eat lots of fruits and vegetables, stay active, and keep portions under control.

Most people have struggle with portion control

If you’re reading this article, you live in a society with too much food. Food production has become more industrialized and cheaper. Healthy food is not just more expensive than unhealthy food, but less convenient. Portion sizes have increased spectacularly in the past several decades—and that includes packaged foods in the grocery stores, meals served at restaurants, and plate sizes at home.

Dr. Brian Wansink, formerly director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (2001,) has shown that plate size prompts portion size. In study after study, he has found (some of his data analyses have been questioned) that the bigger the plate, the more you eat. This trend derives from an optical illusion—the same amount of food on a bigger plate seems smaller.

Whatever size of plate you choose, you’re likely to fill it. As a result, if you reduce your plates’ diameters from 12 inches to 10 inches, you’ll significantly reduce the amount of food you dish up. Besides, per Wansink, using a smaller plate gives the illusion that you’re getting more food. That’s a first step towards addressing your concerns about your health or waistline.

Visual aspects of a meal, such as portion size and plate sizes, can influence how much you eat

'First Bite' by Bee Wilson (ISBN 0465064981) British food writer and food historian Bee Wilson’s brilliant First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (2015; my summary) states,

Being able to regulate the amount of food we eat according to our needs is perhaps the single most important skill when it comes to eating—and the one that we least often master. The first stage is learning to recognize whether the stomach is empty or not.

The first and most obvious step to weight loss is reducing the portion size—and thus the number of calories you eat. When you’re consuming fewer calories than the body uses, you’re likely to start losing weight.

  • Consider one of those “portion control plates” to help reset and reinforce in your mind what a portion size should be. Sectioned and color-coded, these plates take the guesswork out of getting nutrition from all food groups and reduce the risk of overeating.
  • Slow down when you eat, take time to chew and savor your food, and pause between mouthfuls. Stop when you are already full. You don’t need to eat every morsel of what’s dished out for you.
  • If you’re uncomfortable with not filling up your plate and risking disrespecting a host, say at a holiday party buffet, spread your portions around the plate and leave a bit of space around each food item. Your plate will look full but will have fewer calories.

Idea for Impact: Small plates help make portions look more substantial

If you’re trying to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, keep the portions down. You certainly don’t need as much food as you think you do.

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