A Role I Valued, but at Too High a Cost
Last Spring and Summer, I was a volunteer ranger at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site near Badlands National Park in South Dakota. In the Fall, I volunteered to work part-time as an NPS ranger. We were short-staffed, and I wanted to experience life as a full-fledged National Park Service ranger. I went from working two days a month to about nine days a month.
Over the next eight months, however, I found it to be exhausting. Worrying about traveling in winter conditions, which involved a 1.5-hour commute each way, was stressful and tiring. Having to act extroverted for eight hours a day, as a classic introvert, was leaving me exhausted by the end of each day. Each workday consumed more than 11 hours, and I usually needed the following day to recover.
Although I enjoyed my work, I didn’t have the time or energy to do the other things that I thought were important. I was attempting to take a retirement coaching course, publish two blog posts a week, and set up a retirement website. When I had to turn down a part-time job that I desired, it forced me to reevaluate my commitment.
Finally, I realized that this arrangement was not working for me. Although it wasn’t my top priority, it was consuming most of my time and energy. I needed to create more margin by doing less. I wanted to focus on the projects I considered more important, and have time to spend with my wife as well.
In some ways, it was challenging to step away from this work—it’s for an important educational cause, I knew I’d miss the team, the mission, and the feeling that comes with putting on that iconic uniform and flat hat, a quiet symbol of purpose and pride. Several weeks later, however, I see it as one of the best decisions I’ve made in the last ten years.
Why Productivity Isn’t Always Progress
It’s all too easy for us to become overcommitted. We tend to have a wide range of interests and are curious about many things. Responsible people tend to be those who are asked to assume responsibility for even more tasks.
The current productivity mentality makes us feel like we’re not doing it right, unless we’re overly busy. We become more efficient through new workflows, productivity hacks, and apps, allowing us to complete our work in less time. However, instead of giving us more margin to take a break, we fill our free time with more commitments.
Eventually, we reach a position where we’re just trying to keep up by jumping from one task to another and feeling like we’re not doing a good job on any of them. We have little or no margin left, which leads to burnout and a reduced ability to create.
The Discipline of Doing Less
The obvious solution is to do less. This is the core idea in Cal Newport’s recent book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. “DO FEWER THINGS. Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare.”
Do a few things well, rather than doing many things poorly. By doing so, we can more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter the most to us. It’s about depth, not breadth.
Productivity guru Chris Bailey suggests, “When you simplify the tasks, projects, and commitments you take on, you spread your time, attention, and energy across fewer things—and invest more of each into everything you do. The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy.
Four Ways to Create Margin in Your Life
So, how do we reduce the number of things that we’re doing at one time to do less things?
• Decide what truly matters and what doesn’t. What are the important things? And what are some of the other things that we do that are just taking up time and aren’t that important?
One way to separate unnecessary tasks is to ask, “Will anything bad happen if I don’t do this?” If not, maybe it’s not worth doing.
• Reduce the number of obligations by cutting out those that are not necessary or not important. Your goal should be to simplify your work so you can spend most of your time on your most productive and important tasks.
• Set a limited number of active projects. The other projects you have can be put on hold to be activated when one of the active projects is completed.
As Cal Newport points out, every time you agree to take on a new task, you also agree to take on all the administrative overhead that comes with it. So be sure to take this added time commitment into consideration.
Keeping an active/waiting project list can be a particularly helpful approach when you have a work supervisor who wants to assign you more and more projects. Show them the list and ask, “What do you want me to stop working on and put on the inactive list?” This helps them realize that you already have several projects underway, and that you can only accomplish so many things at once. It educates them and makes them set priorities for your work.
• Focus on one project a day. You’ll get more done by channeling your full attention, energy, and time into a single task instead of switching between many. “When you do only one thing in the moment: you invest all your time, attention, and energy into just one thing, which lets you accomplish more in the same amount of time.” The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey.
A Return to What Matters
It took me a while to admit that I couldn’t do it all. But once I stepped back and created space, I found myself again—more present, more focused, more energized.
Doing fewer things isn’t about laziness. It’s about wisdom. It’s about choosing depth over distraction and deciding where your energy belongs.
This week, identify just one commitment you can pause or release—something that no longer serves your deepest priorities. Use that freed-up space not to do more, but to do better.
AI Note: I wrote this blog post myself, using my own words for the initial draft. I used AI only to suggest headlines, section headings, and improvements to the text.
When I post links to product pages on Amazon, my links include a referral code so that when products are purchased after clicking on the link, I sometimes receive a very small percentage of the sale. While the amount that I receive is small, it does help to defray some of the cost of running this site and gives me a small vested interest in having readers purchase products using these links. That said, I do my best to only include links to products I believe are worth buying.