Many of the New Year’s resolutions I hear about are focused on doing more. Weight loss, exercise, saving money, eating healthy, or whatever - the focus is on doing something more than you used to do.

I am not a resolution maker. You could say I am resolute in this position1. However, while working on year-end activities, I realized I could resolve to do less in order to do more.

Every month I have a list of tasks that I work on. They range from sharpening our kitchen knives to downloading the PDFs of my bank statements. I’m old school and still save all of my statements. Because it is a the end/beginning of the year, some extra stuff needs to happen to start preparing for taxes.

While doing this, I realized that there are a bunch of tasks I do monthly that provide me no value on a monthly basis. For example, while I do want to save my bank statements, does it matter if I do it every month or every year? They aren’t going to time out that fast, if ever.

So my less is more effort is going to focus on figuring out what I can do less frequently, or not at all. I’ll start by shifting monthly activities to quarterly and then see what happens.

What can you do less of?

  1. I discourage you from saying this as you may get punished.