I'll tell you though that is relevant to the deep dive I want to do So we're talking about me doing less as a writer so the deep dive I wanted to do today was on the topic of the surprising math of doing less Because when you hear something like I was just talking about My dream schedule as a writer the thing that probably hits The attention of the listener first is like well that doesn't seem like you're doing that much stuff That doesn't seem like it's that much work My argument and this is something I've been thinking through especially as I've been developing my thoughts around my philosophy of slow productivity is that We do too much and we do too much for no good reason Because if we are careful in thinking about the mathematics of value production Doing less is often the optimal strategy That's what I want to argue that doing less can be the optimal strategy now We need some context like what type of thing do we talk about what type of work are we talking about so to be clear?

I'm talking about here. Let's say you're in a job where you create things of Value that is what you do for your job So I don't know if it's computer code or if it's articles or consulting reports or artwork Whatever, but if you're in a job where ultimately You create something that did not exist before Be it digital be it physical and that thing has value that wasn't there before so you're constructing value by creating things Which is a lot of people and a lot of people who listen to this podcast if you're in that context.

I want to argue a scheduling approach that Reduces the amount of things on your plate will actually increase The total amount of value you produce over time If anything we can actually trace a curve we can try to capture these dynamics with a curve what I think about is what I sometimes Call the productivity versus load curve, but imagine for a second that we have some sort of plot Around the x-axis along the bottom we have the amount of things on your plate obligations projects etc tasks and Imagine on the y-axis the vertical axis we have total value you are producing I argue what you're gonna see is pretty soon that curve is going to peak up and reach a maximum Pretty far to the left pretty far to the not that many things to do and as you keep Moving towards the right towards more and more things on your plate that curve is going to come back down And then it'll be a plateau for a while And then it'll once you get to enough stuff on your plate.

It'll actually plummet down to almost no value produced This is the productivity versus load curve It is not like a lot of people suspect something that just keeps going up do more things you you're finishing more things each thing brings Value more things completed means more value you produce more and more values do more things I'm saying no no you actually reach your peak of value production potential pretty early in the potential scale of how many things you're actually doing Now why would that be the case well I'm going to give two categories of explanation The one category I'm going to call negative reasons and the other I'm going to call positive reasons So the the negative reasons why Continuing to add more to your plate actually reduces your total value production has to do with some things We've already talked about on this show negative things that happen Negative things that happen when you add more and more work on your plate and the two big ones we've talked about before I Talked about this in our core idea video about slow productivity.

I talked about this on my appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast the two things that really get bad as you get more and more stuff on your plate is the anxiety of overload and the overhead of overload So we've talked about this before the anxiety piece is that we as human beings have this really neat Center in our brain as far as we know it is unique to humans We've looked at our close primate relatives that have not found it at least in the same configuration But we have this portion in our brain that is good at making long-term plans for the accomplishment of important goals This separates us from a lot of other animals.

How does our brain get us to do things? well, it makes us feel good when we construct a plan and Execute that plan and accomplish the goal and it makes us feel bad If we don't if we don't have a plan or we veer away from our plan And that's what just steers us evolutionarily speaking towards actually making plans towards long-term goals the problem is this center of our brain cannot deal with 600 unread messages and 75 different open obligations on your task list When it sees 15 columns on your Trello board and each of them is getting longer and longer You short-circuit that portion of your brains ability to conceive Making a plan and executing all these different tasks and when you short-circuit that part of your brain You flood those negative chemicals.

You feel anxious you feel uneasy. You're feeling that reaction. It's like we're not Sticking with our plans because that brain cannot create plans for that much work. It's a very artificial It's very unnatural to have a ton of stuff on your plate. It's hard to produce good work in that state The second issue I mentioned is overhead This is very pragmatic Every obligation on your plate will bring with it a fixed amount of overhead Emails with people checking in on how it's going Meetings or zoom calls for status updates everything on your plate at least everything beyond the trivial size Brings with it a fixed amount of overhead There's nothing wrong with that overhead when you're looking at a particular thing.

You're trying to accomplish. It's good That you can quickly check in with people on email about how it's going It's good to meet with people on a regular basis to check in but as you increase the number of things on your plate the amount of overhead being brought by each thing is the same and it adds and it compounds and now most of your time Ends up with this unavoidable fixed overhead I have to answer the emails about the 20 different things going on each of these 20 different things has its own zoom meeting and it Toxically or some might say cruelly squeezes away the time required to actually do the work So just a pragmatic limitation the more things you have the more this overhead which is useful But does not directly produce value dominates your schedule.

So the amount of literal time left to convert in the value is greatly reduced So those two factors are negative Negative impacts on your ability to produce value there are also Positive impacts. So we said here's the negative of doing too much. There's positive impacts on doing less I think this is something that We intuit but we don't often capture precisely Which is if you're looking at a particular pursuit project or activity The value of what you produce is going to grow Non-linearly with the time you put into it So, for example Doubling the time you put into a particular creative project Doesn't necessarily just double the value produce it might significantly more increase that value because it turns out there's these Discontinuous jumps in the value of what you're doing as you cross certain thresholds There's a discontinuous jump as you move for example past the amateur threshold in almost any creative pursuit Once what you're producing is no longer just I kind of did something I kind of just sort of just an amateur effort and actually has a professional polish which takes more time It significantly jumps up in its potential value to the marketplace There's another discontinuous jump that happens when you push something to the level that it becomes remarkable Which I mean in the literal sense that now you've added something that's so novel innovative or well done that it actually leads people to remark Look at that.

That's interesting. It catches people's attention something with that attribute jumps up to another level in value and All of that requires time So the more time you put into things you jump past the amateur level then you jump past to the remarkable level and you get this Significant profound increase in the value of what you are producing and these effects can also be seen through a market analogy Essentially the more time you put on something the more aggressively you you essentially pare away The other people who could produce the same level of quality of what you just produce and as that market gets smaller and smaller your value Jumps up much higher as well But what this all comes down to is that if you have less things on your plate You can spend more times on the things that remain Spending more times on the thing that remain will generate much more value than if you instead spread that same time over many more things So this is mathematical if value increases nonlinearly With time spent your best strategy is to put as much time as possible on the fewest number of things.

That's just pure mathematics So let's again, let's make this real concrete If you're writing something Spending almost all your time working on making that thing you're writing really well So, I don't know you have 20 hours to spend the week spending all 20 hours on that Is in the end probably gonna produce way more value Than if you instead spend five hours on that five hours on something else five hours on something else and then five individual hours on five small things You can't just take the value of these smaller investments and add them up and get the same as what you would get if you put all that time into the one thing because When you put all your time to the one thing you leap past the levels you were before So we got negative and positive Reasons that tell us less is better you do too much all these negative things happen to drag you down You do less all these positive impacts happen that push up even more the value you produce So I think this is the situation we're in right now in our in our current world Especially in the American economic scene where we have this very large knowledge sector That emphasizes skilled employees with great autonomy to individually produce Value there's so many people who now fall within that type of economic context and in that situation almost certainly doing less is better and no one does and All of the pressure is towards can't you just do a little more?

Can't you answer one more email? Can't you be on one more zoom call? It is chaos. It is the Wild West when it comes to how we handle work today and because of that We're leaving a lot of value on the table And I I'm gonna leave it there But it is the point I want to make is that that we can move beyond simply arguing Doing less is good for the human soul doing more is just the rapacious Objective of marauding capitalists that might be true But we have this other piece of ammo to use as well, which is actually doing less also produces more value So it not just makes us happier not just makes work more sustainable But it actually increases the value we are able to produce which makes us again happier.

It's all a good cycle So I'm a huge believer in less that's at one of the the three main tenets of my slow productivity Philosophy which has three pieces do fewer things working at a natural pace obsessing over quality This is at the beginning of that philosophy do fewer things.

That's a big reason why I believe That's true Jesse this is all just secretly me trying to speak to like my academic My academic peers like the people who are above me giving me things to do is like just let me do less It's all just a cry all just a cry for help Like we're trying worse.

We're on a tight schedule today because I have to be on zoom Can't be maximizing the value in the world Do the people above you work on multiple things? Are they? It's crazy if you're in an academic administrative position Every minute of your day is scheduled At least have people doing it for you, but it's like being the president.

Yeah, it's just okay, you know, here's what's next. Here's what's next And you get a lot of questions like that for managers and stuff who just want to do more deep work But they don't have any time blocks to put it in. Yeah, it's the problem of the entire economy right now I mean, whatever.

This is the major split I think I have with a lot of other commentators is that we Underestimate the degree that these problems come from not knowing how to do this work It's we're quick to just we want an antagonist. So we have someone to fight So managers are being evil is the instinct there's a lot of evil managers out there But even if we had the nicest possible managers who wanted you to thrive We would still have this overload problem because we don't have the alternatives in place.

There's just not enough structure We just don't think about this stuff. And so I'm doing my Doing what I can to help that