To get more done, do less

They say if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. That may be true, but the problem is that it leads to busy people becoming overwhelmed with work. If you are one of these people, I have a top tip for you: Do less.

That sounds easy but research shows that is much harder than it sounds. The busier we get, the harder it becomes to stop doing things and cut our workload. Take a look at the figure below. Participants in a lab experiment were asked to adjust the figure so that it becomes symmetrical both from left to right and from top to bottom.

What is the simplest way to make this figure symmetrical from left to right and from top to bottom?

Source: Adams et al. (2021)

There are two ways to do that, either by adding green squares in the three empty corners or by deleting the six green squares in the bottom right-hand corner. But while the subtraction is much simpler, more people choose to add green squares to the three empty corners.

Then the experimenters asked participants to do the same but this time a random set of numbers was scrolling below the figure and participants also had to press a button when they saw the digit ‘5’. As you can imagine, paying attention to this number task can become quite stressful depending on how fast the numbers scroll by. But the key is that people who were busy thinking about the puzzle and looking at the numbers were even less likely to find the solution to the puzzle by subtracting the green squares.

What this and similar experiments show is that it is harder to think about what we can stop doing in our lives than to think about what we can do on top of what we already do. And the more we take on in additional tasks the harder it becomes for us to mentally think about what we can stop doing. The result is that we become busier and busier and more and more overwhelmed. And as we become more overwhelmed, the quality of our work and our productivity is likely to drop.

‘Just say no’, may be a simple slogan, but this research shows it is also a pretty ineffective slogan because people have a hard time deciding what to say no to.

So here is my recommendation for you for the weekend. Use the downtime you have over the weekend to think about your life and your work. Think about what you can cut out without neglecting your work duties or offending family and friends. Write down what you come up with and then write a plan for how you will put this into practice. If cutting stuff takes deliberate thought, so does the action (or rather inaction, in this case). And if something isn’t easy, it is well worth making a plan and executing it, because if you don’t, chances are you will be busy doing other things.