Do less.
Two words. I have been told them by three different people at three different points in my life, and I did not use any of it until long after it would have helped.
That is the part I find uncomfortable. Not that nobody told me. Three people told me, clearly, to my face, at exactly the moments I needed to hear it. I nodded each time. I thought I understood. Then I went straight back to doing more.
- The first time, I was young enough that doing more was the only lever I had. No track record, no authority, nothing to trade on except effort. So when someone suggested I was taking on too much, it sounded like being told to slow down in a race I had only just entered. I filed it under advice for people further along than me.
- The second time was worse, because by then doing more had been working. I had been promoted on the back of it. I was the person who absorbed whatever landed. Telling me to do less was telling me to stop doing the exact thing I was being rewarded for.
I remember thinking the advice was well meant and slightly naive. - The third time I was already in trouble and did not know it yet. Everything was still getting done. Nothing had collapsed. But the quality had gone quiet. Things I would normally have done properly were being done adequately, and nobody noticed because adequate still arrives on time.
That is the dangerous phase. Not the breakdown, but the long stretch before it where the output looks fine, and the judgment behind it has thinned out.
What finally made it land was not a crisis. It was reading about a factory.
In The Toyota Way, Jeffrey Liker lays out something that reorganised how I think about workload. Toyota does not just hunt waste. It hunts three things, and most Western companies only imported one of them.
- Muda is waste. Effort that produces nothing. That is the one everybody copied.
- Mura is unevenness. Feast and famine, the quiet week followed by the week where everything lands at once.
- Muri is overburden. People and machines pushed past what they can sustain.
Toyota treats overburden as a defect. Not as commitment, not as going the extra mile. A defect, in the same category as a faulty part, because it reliably produces errors downstream.
Read that again if you work the way I used to. The thing I thought was my strongest professional quality is classified, in one of the most studied production systems in history, as a fault to be engineered out.
Liker’s fourth principle says it plainly: level out the workload, and work like the tortoise, not the hare.
Two other books sharpened it.
In The Goal, Eliyahu Goldratt makes an argument that sounds wrong until it does not. In any system, output is set by the constraint. Improving anything that is not the constraint produces no gain at all. You just create inventory, or in human terms, work in progress nobody is waiting for.
Most of my busiest periods were exactly that. Enormous activity at points in the system that were not the bottleneck. It felt productive. However, it changed nothing.
And in Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman names the trap underneath all of it. Getting faster at clearing your work does not empty the queue. It signals that you can absorb more, so more arrives. Efficiency is not a route to breathing room. It is a route to a larger volume of the same pressure.
Every efficiency I built in my twenties, I spent immediately (if you know what I mean).
So why could I not hear it the first three times?
Because advice only lands when you have already half-learned the thing yourself. You need the beginnings of your own evidence before someone else’s sentence has anywhere to attach.
The first time, I had no evidence. The second time, my evidence pointed the other way. The third time, the evidence was arriving, and I had not yet looked at it properly.
The words were identical on all three occasions. What changed was me.
I wrote recently about leaving notes behind for whoever is next. This is the other half of that. The person handing you the pages has no way of knowing whether they are the first attempt or the third. They write it down anyway, and sometimes it is the third one that lands.
Which also means “I wish I’d heard it sooner” is not quite true. I heard it. I was not ready to receive it, and no amount of better phrasing from them would have fixed that.
Now the honest part, because this is a confession and not a lesson.
I have not taken the advice. Anyone who knows how I spend a week could tell you that.
What I have done is narrower. I have mostly stopped adding things in order to feel useful. When I take something on now, it is because it is the constraint, or because it is genuinely mine to carry. That is a real change, and it is smaller than the advice I was given.
I am still closer to the hare than the tortoise. I know which one Toyota would pick. Toyota would say the steady pace wins, and they are probably right.
If somebody has told you something twice and you are still not using it, that is worth sitting with. It is not a sign that they explained it badly.
It usually means the evidence has started arriving and you have not looked at it yet.
