If you’re a modern knowledge worker, your typical day might look something like this: you go to work, read and reply to emails, attend meetings, grab a coffee, have lunch, attend more meetings, catch up on emails, and finally head home. You’re busy from the moment you arrive until the moment you leave.
When you do find a moment of unplanned time, you’re likely bombarded with beeps, dings, calls, and interruptions from colleagues who need just a sliver of your time. After all, they, too, have urgent tasks and looming deadlines. At the end of a long day, you come home mentally and physically drained, wondering what you got done.
The next day, you head into the office, determined to get some work done. You start to think about how to work more productively when, ding, an urgent meeting invite pops up to deal with a critical problem you were not even aware of.
It doesn’t matter that you haven’t done the work to have an informed opinion; what matters is that you attend and try to solve the problem. Despite your best intentions, your plan to work better flies out the window, along with any hope of sanity.
If we can’t work smarter, we resort to working harder. We cut out lunch, skip the gym, and run from one meeting to another so we can fit more in. Being busy seems to matter more than getting stuff done.
We’re doing more busywork but less real work. It seems like the only real work happens when you start earlier, stay later, or often, both. We find quiet, uninterrupted time, when no one is around.
The paradox is that in an effort to do more, we end up doing less.
When you find yourself in a hole, the best thing to do is stop digging. By failing to think about how we’re working, we only burn ourselves out.
There is another way to improve performance, albeit unconventional: Eliminate the bullshit.
Stop doing the busywork and start spending your time adding value to yourself, your clients, your co-workers, and your friends.
Do Less to Do More
Focus on what’s important and eliminate the rest.
Before doing anything, ask yourself, “Is this necessary?” If not, ask yourself why you’re doing it in the first place.
This idea comes from stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who wrote in Meditations:
[M]ost of what we say and do is not essential. Eliminate it, you’ll have more time and more tranquility. Ask yourself, is this necessary.
So why don’t more people follow this advice?
John Maynard Keynes offers an explanation in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”
No one wants to be unconventional or different. What we fail to realize is that if you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results everyone else gets. It stands to reason that if you want better results than others, you should be doing something different from them.
More people should follow Aurelius’s advice—it’s not difficult, it’s common sense. It only seems difficult because it’s unconventional.