About doing less
Summary
There’s always more to do than I’ll ever have time for. I’m sure you face similar choices in life and at work. I take a detour today, to explain why I’m doing less than I possibly can with this website and my professional presence on the web.
Several months back, my wife and I reflected on our values. We also imposed a constraint on ourselves - we couldn’t have over five values. I found it a fascinating exercise because I hadn’t ever given my values much thought. The constraint forced us to prioritise what mattered most to us. At the end of the exercise, I zeroed in on these five values.
😇 Peace of mind: maintaining a sense of calm is important to me.
🎓 Learning: I enjoy the challenge I experience when I learn something new.
💪🏾 Autonomy: being able to do anything on my terms matters to me.
⏳ Time: the biggest dividend any success can give me is more control over my time.
💙 Relationships: I have a few deep relationships and friendships, which I cannot and will not ignore.
Living the last couple of years with the knowledge of these values has helped me make some tradeoffs. And today I want to explain some tradeoffs I make with this site, and whatever else I do in my professional life.
There’s always a lot to do
I’m not a social media influencer. This website doesn’t get crazy traffic either. I post the occasional YouTube video, appear on the odd podcast and publish stray articles in external publications. My aim was never to be famous. All I wanted to do was voice my opinions about what the future of knowledge work should be like. Less about the tools, and more about humanity.
And I’ve been lucky to find allies along the way. Indeed, that was the aim of my project, when I started it. I value a small band of committed co-conspirators, far more than a mass following. Trust me, this isn’t a case of sour grapes!
But even though my network of allies; let’s call it a community; is small, I always hear suggestions of the many things I can do to amplify my message.
Why don’t you host a podcast?
Why don’t you do more videos?
Why aren’t you on X, formerly Twitter?
When will you provide an online course?
How about starting a newsletter on Substack?
What do you think about being a freelance consultant?
Each of those ideas and the dozen others I haven’t listed is alluring. But it may be a long time before I get to any of them. And who knows, there are some I may never get to.
What I do shouldn’t erode my values
Asyncagile.org is a one-person operation today. Some people who follow me, and don’t yet know me, may not know that I do this outside my day job, which is that of a tech consultant. Writing here began as an act of catharsis. If you go back to the first posts I wrote, you’ll see me bemoaning the mindless patterns of work we’ve normalised with distributed work. One thing led to another, and I wrote a book about the topic. Over the last few years, I’ve blogged almost every week, without fail. This website has many tools and resources to help you go async-first. I’m quite proud of where things are today, but I’ve had to do a lot of work during personal time.
So here’s the place where that bit about values comes back into play. How much do I bite off, before it becomes too much to chew? What’s the impact on my peace of mind? How much control over my time must I give up? Does it interfere with how I invest myself in the relationships I care about? What will I learn from any extra activity? How much autonomy will I gain or lose from the activities I commit to?
When I examine my answers to all or some of these questions, I find that most times, I’ll decide not to do anything new.
A cautionary tale about too much to do
As I tell you this, I remember one of my ex-bosses, who organised a workshop with the entire unit we were working in. High on coffee and sugary treats, employees in that workshop came up with dozens of ideas of things we could do to earn more money, be more efficient and deliver in more sophisticated ways. I’m sure you can relate because these “brainstorming” sessions are commonplace. Everyone left that workshop high on energy. Keen not to lose the momentum, my boss organised the ideas into 16 “focus areas” and asked people to sign up to drive each of them. The silence that followed the call for signups must have been the perfect killjoy for the energy that people experienced in the brainstorming session. But when you think of it, it makes complete sense! Why would anyone with a full-time job sign up to do another job, for no tangible benefit? Ideas are cheap, execution is costly.
But let’s assume for a moment that we could have funded many of those ideas. I argued with my boss that we’d have still struggled to achieve anything meaningful. After all, isn’t it oxymoronic to focus on 16 things? It’s the literal definition of being unfocused. It didn’t surprise me that all of those ideas went to die on a spreadsheet.
Making peace with doing less
About a decade back, Jim Highsmith wrote about the idea of “do less” in his book, Adaptive Leadership. Jim wrote eloquently about why “Do less” is the flip side of “Focus on what is important.” While he aimed his advice to software teams, the wisdom’s equally applicable to individuals.
Too often, we mistake a frenzy of activity as a proxy for productivity. We believe that the ever-responsive colleague on Slack is the most effective coworker one can have. It’s easy to conflate success and happiness with a popular following and an upbeat tone of voice on social media. When we dig deeper though, none of these proxies mean much.
In his latest book, Slow Productivity, Cal Newport lists three principles to cultivate a deep and meaningful life.
Do fewer things.
Work at a natural pace.
Obsess over quality.
My boss’s story and Jim Highsmith’s advice should already echo with #1. The agile movement has long advocated for a sustainable pace. Overwork does nothing for the long term, except normalising more death marches in the future. That’s #2. And most people who do remarkable work will tell you that a few exceptional pieces of work count for much more than several other, mediocre outputs. Instead of trying to leave our signatures on many pieces of work, we should ask ourselves where we’d be proud to have those signatures. That’s #3.
So, no, I won’t host a podcast anytime soon. I don’t have the time to commit to a newsletter. I won’t start anything that I can’t follow through with for at least a year. Being able to switch off on weekends and after I end work each day, is important to me. This gives me time to process my photographs, spend time with my wife, children and friends and pay attention to my health and fitness. I also want to take breaks without many hang-ups. I’m taking a six-week sabbatical at the end of this month. Likely, you won’t hear a squeak from me during that time. And I’m glad my silence doesn’t make a shred of difference to the universe. In the larger scheme of things, I’m insignificant and that’s a good thing.
All this said I’ve been able to fit a few extra activities into the limited time I have available. I’m soon hosting a live training session with O’Reilly in May 2024. Keep your eyes peeled for that if you’re interested. I hope to publish my distributed leadership assessment and playbook soon. At some point, I’ll publish an online course about asynchronous collaboration too. But I can’t promise a date on either of those last two resources. That’s ok, isn’t it? I’m sure whenever they’re ready, it will be the right time for them 😀.