episode 240: doing less is the life hack you didn’t know you needed
Sometimes the reason you’re not doing the thing to you need or want to do…is because you’ve made it way too complicated.
I realized recently I’d turned a simple daily habit into a whole production — the “perfect” setup, the ideal conditions, all the steps to make it better — until it became so much work that I stopped doing it completely.
In this episode, I’m sharing:
The sneaky way I overcomplicated something I’d been doing for years
How chasing “perfect” often kills our ability to show up at all
The good/better/best framework I use with clients to strip things down to the minimum viable version
How to create your own “do less” plan so you can actually follow through
If doing less makes you feel uncomfortable—like you’re not doing enough—this episode will begin to change the way you think about making progress.
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Untitled 2 - 8:12:25, 2.09 PM
[00:00:00]
Hello friends. So if you're watching this on YouTube, you're gonna notice that I am in a different location, although I think barely anyone lately has been watching this on YouTube. Um, I'm recording today in my kitchen. Typically, I record upstairs in my office with like, like a high quality mic hooked up, and today I'm doing it in my kitchen and it's like a little bit meta as it pertains to today's episode.
Um, last week, or at this point, by the time you listened to this, it'll have been two weeks ago. I posted a story about going to the gym and working out, and this idea around what can we do to make things easier for ourselves, um, that we get so wrapped up in this is what it needs to look like or this is what needs to happen and this is what's ideal.
And then we never end up following through on things. And I actually wanted to pull up the story. I meant to do that before I even started this podcast, but I can do it very quickly right now. Um. Boo Boo. It was [00:01:00] August 6th. 'cause I have a note written down. Um. Right. I was talking about going for a walk with my weighted vest, but how I'd been kind of like struggling to get back into the gym and what could I do to make it easier for myself?
And that's kind of the theme of this podcast. So there's another topic I'm gonna talk about that I've been thinking about, and as I thought about it, I'm like, oh, this is the same thing. This is just another situation. This popping up in my life. Right? So where can you, what is, I want you to think about something that you are struggling with right now in your life.
Could be anything big or small could be related to the work we do here or not, right? So this could be around food, it could be around exercise, it could be around something with a relationship and spending time with someone. It could be how you prioritize your time or time management, or how much time you're spending on social media, or you wanna read books or you wanna spend more time outside, or you want to online shop list, like literally anything.
And think to yourself about the beliefs you have in your head around what you need to do to change that thing, [00:02:00] right? Kind of run through the list, and then what can you take away from that to do less, to make it easier? What can you remove from that list that will get you more like a bare minimum approach, right?
I want you to think about a good, better, best approach. What would be good and by good I want you to think about really good is maybe a misnomer, like kind of like a bare minimum. What's a bare minimum thing that will move me at least a little bit in the direction that I wanna go? What's a quote better or kind of middle of the road option and what's a best, what would be kind of like the ideal option, right?
Your brain, you already know the ideal option. That's the list that you just made. We wanna dial it back. And so part of this, it's really hard to do that because we think it's not enough. We think it doesn't count. We think we're not gonna make progress. But the reality is when we try to do all the things, that's really what keeps us from making progress, right?
That's kind of the great irony of the whole thing. When [00:03:00] we do less, we make more progress than when we do more. Right. So let's, I mean, that'll show up. I was just gonna like write that down because I've never actually articulated it in that way before, but I think it's actually pretty powerful. So you gotta think about what can I remove?
How much can I remove and still have kind of like, what, like, like a minimum viable product or a minimum viable process that's going to at least get me going in the right direction. It's gonna feel weird, it's gonna feel uncomfortable, it's gonna feel like it's not enough. And when you feel that way, that's how you know you're in the sweet spot.
That is actually where you need to be. So I wanna talk about a specific example of this that has come up for me recently. If you follow me on social media, and if you don't, I highly recommend that you do. 'cause I post a lot of really good content, um, for a long time now. I would say years. I've posted what I wear each day and I don't post it.
'cause I'm trying to be an influencer. I don't post links to the things that I buy or wear. Um, I don't even post like the, I don't [00:04:00] even tag like the designer. Rarely. Sometimes I will do that if it's a piece that I like, love, or wanna talk about or think you guys would like. I post what I wear daily because investing the time, energy, and attention into getting dressed most days of the week, most days of the week is a form of self-care for me.
It is work that I do on my body image. It's work that I do to take care of myself, and it has made a huge impact on me over time in terms of how I feel in my body and the pleasure I take in getting dressed and understanding what I like and what I don't like to wear and what's comfortable in what fits.
Um, just in how I feel in clothes and how I feel in my body. Okay. That's, and I, I take those pictures and share them for that reason, and I talk about that all the time. I talk about that. I talk about it on the days where I don't leave the house, or I don't even see clients on Zoom and I still get dressed and put on makeup.
And why do I do that? Right? Because it's for me, and I'm, I'm paying attention and focusing on how I look for me, not for other people, right? So, a. And we'll spend too much time talking about that, but it's been important to [00:05:00] me and I did it daily. And here's the thing. So there's a full length mirror in our bedroom.
It is on the inside of the closet door to Danny's closet. When I take a picture there I am backlit. There's a window directly behind me. And so the lighting sucks. It's either that or an overhead light, right? And when you take pictures, the best lighting is when the lighting is in front of you. So behind the camera, not behind the object, right?
This is like photography 1 0 1. If you don't know that you're welcome. So I am backlit, so I see myself in the mirror and then I hold my phone up to take the selfie and I'm like, oh my God. This is like not even what I look like at all. But I took the pictures like that for a long time and they were fine.
They did the job. And then at some point, maybe like six or eight months ago, I got this cool little, um, like video, a camera or phone mount that like suctions to basically any service. And it has like the, um. A mag safe attachment. So there's none of these like annoying tripods where you have to like [00:06:00] stretch the thing to hold your phone like so fucking annoying.
This literally like magnetizes onto this thing and it goes anywhere. So it is super easy to kind of set up the phone to take pictures and I was like, okay, cool. Now I have this, this means I can take a picture in a better location. So I found a spot. My front door, we have sidelights, well our front doors, our French door, but we also have sidelights.
So I can stand in front of that and the, the lights in front of me, I can. Um, stick the mount and have the camera. And then what I've actually, why I had started doing was instead of just taking a still photo, I was taking like a seven second video of me, like walking to and from the camera, because I think that the, the reason I was doing that, doing that is because it better represents.
What it actually is to be in an outfit, right? When you take a static photo of an outfit, right, you can kind of really pose yourself and you can adjust yourself, and you can get kind of like this perfect quote, air quotes, perfect angle. But as you're moving about your day and you're sitting, and you're standing and you're walking and you're talking and you're reaching and squatting, the [00:07:00] outfit doesn't look like that.
It moves, right? It bends, it folds, it bulges, like it's not this perfectly styled thing that you see on social media with like. How all these people perfectly place things. And so I was like, cool, this I get better lighting so it better like represents and things look better aesthetically, but I can also now better represent what it is to actually be in this outfit.
And I started doing that pretty regularly. And then at a certain point, I don't know how long ago it just dropped off. And because I would have to pull out the thing from the drawer. I'd have to stick it. I'd have to, these are all the steps I'd have to, if you're watching on YouTube or if you're not, just a matter, I have a, a, a mag safe loop on the back of my phone.
You can hear it clicking. I have to pull that off. I have to mount the thing to the door. I have to stick the camera, and I have to take the 10 seconds to film the video. We are talking like 30 seconds of effort. That became an obstacle to me doing this right? I'm being totally honest with you right now 'cause this is real.
If you think about the obstacles, like get in your way of doing things, sometimes they are like minuscule [00:08:00] when you look at them, but they feel big in the moment. That is normal. And so my other alternative was to go back to taking the still photo in the bedroom, which was easy because it was right there.
It's where I'm getting dressed. It would take me two seconds, but I'm like, no, those look terrible now. So then I basically had, I wasn't filming the video on the front door, and I didn't like the way those photos looked, so I literally stopped doing it. I didn't realize this is why I had stopped doing it.
I've noticed over the past several months, I would say two to three months that I rarely do it anymore, and, and I started thinking about why. And I realized this is why, because it became too much work to set up the little mount on the front door. And I decided that the pictures upstairs weren't good enough because of the lighting.
And so I stopped doing it completely and I was like, holy shit. This is a really simple fix, right? This is where good, better, best comes in. Okay, so what's my good option here? My good option, my minimum viable [00:09:00] product option here would be to go back to taking the pictures upstairs with a shitty lighting.
I was, had a ton of success with doing that. I did it pretty much every day. The mirror is right where I get dressed. It's like super turnkey. The fact that the lighting is not great, it's like, okay, so what? I'm still showing up. I'm still seeing the picture. I'm still documenting. I'm still able to communicate the thing that I need to communicate.
I'm not a stylist here. I'm not an influencer trying to make money or show you the different like colors and textures of what I'm wearing. That's not my objective here. Right. My objective is simply to show you that I got dressed if it's a cute outfit, right, and I feel good in it, and why I did it. So by doing that, by identifying that as my minimum vial option, viable option is look my good option.
I'm doing less. I don't have to worry about remembering. 'cause then I come downstairs and it's like, then I kind of forget, oh shit, I have to take the picture. It also was like an environment thing I was so used to doing in my bedroom for so long that changing it up and doing it in a different [00:10:00] environment started to like throw me off.
So I don't have to come, I don't have to remember to pull the, the camera mount out of the drawer. I don't have to take the thing off my phone. I don't have to set it up. I don't have to film it. Right. It just, those things are super quick, but they were. They were blocking me, right? So how can I do less? How can you do less?
What can you do to make things easier for yourself? Where are you making things harder for yourself By trying to do all the things or be perfect, right? I was trying to do all the things. I was trying. I need to have the right lighting, and I need to have the video, and I need to do it every day, and all these things, and it ended up keeping me from doing it at all.
Right? So you go from doing everything to doing nothing. This is a perfect example. When we do more, we actually end up doing less. When we do less, we end up with a better outcome. Again, that's hard and it seems counterintuitive, but I think as you examine. The thing that I asked you to think about at the beginning, the thing that you are struggling with, you will see that [00:11:00] a big reason that you are not able to follow through and do that thing with any level of frequency is because you're trying to do too much.
And if you did less, you would set yourself up to do that thing more often, and which would help you get the outcome that you are after. It is okay to make things easy, to let it be easy. And again, I'm gonna say this again. If that makes you feel weird and makes you feel uncomfortable and makes you feel like you're not doing enough, then that's actually right where you need to be.
That's how you're gonna know that you're in the sweet spot. So again, I'm always here to have conversations like, I hope that sharing the thing about the photos is helpful for you. And I posted today, if you, so this is gonna air on Monday, August 18th. I'm recording it on the 12th. So when you listen to this, if you happen to remember, I posted a story.
In my mirror upstairs, and I talked about that. I was gonna talk about it on a podcast and, and this is that podcast. Um, so if there was something you were struggling with with this, and you are need to figure out how to make it [00:12:00] easier, how to do less, send me a note. Let me know, let me know what your do less plan is.
Maybe that's a thing I start talking about. What's your do less plan, do less? Um, this is something we talk about in coaching all of the time. So many conversations I have with clients where we talk about, okay, what's gonna be our plan? What are we working on? And they list off a whole bunch of things. And I'm like, how realistic is that?
How confident are you that that is going to happen? And sometimes they realize that it's not gonna happen, and sometimes they don't. And sometimes you have to try it and see and then adjust. Here's my do less plan. I didn't do enough, less. I need to do lesser, I can't think of like the, the, the English language, appropriate word for this, but do less, more or less.
Um, more or less it's more better. Um, so I think this is everything I wanted to kind of share with us. Um. Make it easy, let it be easy. Things can be easier. This applies to the gym. It applies to cooking and food. It applies to everything. There is a way to do less for [00:13:00] everything until you get to the smallest building block, the smallest possible thing that you can do that gives you some version of the outcome that you want.
It's not the ideal outcome. It doesn't need to be the ideal outcome. It's a version of that outcome. That's what we are looking for here. Um, love to talk it through with you. So reach out, send me a DM or an email if you want to, um, kind of bounce some ideas around and I'll be