By Leo Babauta

These days, a lot of people I talk to are feeling burnout — exhaustion from endless work that can often feel pointless, overloaded lives with not enough restorative rest, constant replying to messages and overwhelmed by information, drained by social media scrolling, and inundated with stressful world news.

If you’re feeling this, I’m going to share a skill that sounds simple, but can be deceptively difficult: doing less, on purpose.

What I’m talking about is doing less as a deliberate practice, not because of a failure to keep up. We’re making a deliberate choice to do less, not a forced choice because you’re burned out and can’t keep your head above water.

Doing less is arguably harder than trying to do everything from fear of missing out, or because you’re trying to optimize every single thing in your life. It’s harder because it takes some letting go, and a willingness to tolerate discomfort, and a willingness to do things a little differently than everyone else.

Let’s take a look.

The Deliberate Practice of Doing Less

What would doing less look like, as a practice? It’s something you could do every day, as opposed to just purging everything all at once.

For example, you might practice:

• Picking one thing from your todo list and deliberately choosing not to do it today. Push it back until next week.

• Limiting yourself to only a certain number of tasks each day — let’s say 5 tasks.

• Deliberately choosing to stop working at a certain time, and honoring that boundary. (Let’s say 5pm, or 4pm.)

• Looking at your calendar and deciding to uncommit to one thing each week.

• Challenging yourself to say No to all invitations, if your schedule is overloaded, for a month.

• Creating unstructured time in your schedule, and not letting yourself fill it with a bunch of busywork or meetings.

Do any of these resonate with you? What do you think you’d get out of it?

I should note that the thing that stand in the way of doing less is usually fear. The fear of falling behind, of people noticing you’re doing less. We don’t want to ignore this fear, but the most important thing is to acknowledge that it is simply fear. We can sit with it, let ourselves soothe the fear, and not let it drive our lives. Be kind to the fear, but it’s not in charge.

The Space Created by Doing Less

What’s the point of all of this? We create space that we desperately need.

What you’ll likely notice about this space you create:

1. You have some downtime to actually restore your mental and physical health. You start to feel more energized and motivated once you’re more restored.

2. You have time to move your body, to prepare healthy food, and to do self-care things you might be neglecting.

3. You feel a sense of being able to breathe. It’s an incredible thing to feel this.

In the end, doing less isn’t about optimizing your life and being more productive in the long run. It’s about living a life of sanity, cultivating that inner peace you’ve been craving, and enjoying your days more.

So my invitation to you, my friends, is to choose one thing to remove this week, instead of adding more and more.