Why You Should Do Less This Year (and How You Can)
We thought you might find this article about prioritizing your time to be helpful as the year 2020 kicks off.
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Wisdom gathered from dozens of interviews with prominent psychologists through work on my psychology podcast, Psychologists off the Clock, has lead me to a central idea: We take the idea of neglect too seriously. That’s true even about our children, our jobs, and other demanding life roles. That's why my resolution for the coming year is to neglect more of my responsibilities, more often, and more strategically (and not just because I've dropped the ball or come to the end of my rope yet again).
There are, of course, times we should do more in our most important life roles. But in our worry-driven modern age it’s far more often the case that we should do a whole lot less. Thousands of years ago, Taoists came up with a concept called Wu Wei, which described the power of non-action, or simply letting things go. ‘Sure,’ you say, ‘if I stop doing I can have lots of fun, but then… things won’t get done. Not sure my kids, spouse, or boss, would delight in that.’ But it turns out that a little non-action can go a long way.
Our modern parenting ethos glorifies the parent that is always-present, always-enriching, and always-watching. Yet engaging in benign neglect of our children can be great for kids and parents alike. Yes, too much neglect is an obvious problem—we don’t want to leave our children in unsafe or unconsidered positions. But intensive parenting practices hinder our children’s resilience, independence, academic performance, and mental health. Take a study that evaluated the mental health of college students who described having overly controlling parents. Researchers Holly Schiffrin and Miriam Liss found that compared to students without overly controlling parents, students reported higher levels of depression and lower life satisfaction. In our podcast interview, Holly and Miriam laughed as they me that they, too, have learned the value of neglecting their children in small but important ways. In another interview, Kim Brooks, author of Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear, talked with me about the growing body of research showing that doing less as parents offers our children greater independence, confidence, and opportunities to develop their own competencies.
Neglecting our work can be similarly advantageous. Work burnout is characterized by emotional exhaustion, detachment, and diminished efficiency. Despite a pressure to get more done, doing less helps our work by preventing, mitigating, and helping us to recover from work burnout. As author, Alex Pang, describes in his wonderful book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, doing less at work can give us a boost in our productivity over time and our creative edge. Delegating tasks to others and choosing more carefully the kinds of assignments we take on versus those that we say ‘no’ to can help us do better in the responsibilities we retain. As Pang told me in our interview, learning to say no, let go, and do less helps us become happier as well as more successful because we have devoted our finite resources to the activities we deem most essential.