Do Less, Enjoy More

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away - Antoine de Saint Exupery

Most productivity blogs and books will teach you how to do more, to get more done, to be more productive. I want to teach you to do less, to get less done, to be less productive. Doing less is not about being lazy (though being lazy is a good start) -- it's about focusing on quality rather than quantity. It's about getting off the hamster wheel of productivity, so that you can create something great rather than just being busy. Let's take a few examples:

A furniture maker can mass-produce a ton of cheap furniture that will fall apart within a year. Another craftsman might produce way fewer pieces of furniture, but make them beautifully and solidly, so that they'll last for generations. If he makes them well enough, they might even be sought out and remembered for their great design.

A programmer can write tens of thousands of lines of code, and produce a lot of software that work. A less productive coder can write a tenth of the lines, perhaps even editing down what she writes so that there's less code, but they're better written. This small program might be the most useful thing on many people's computers, flawless code that just works.