Do Less to Do More

A pared back life pays dividends

Dec 18, 2023

‘How do you do it all? Your consulting and coaching business is taking off, you’re building ExponentialChangemakers, and you’ve got a growing newsletter on Substack; that’s impressive! How are you finding the time?’

I’ve heard a version of this from people a few times in the past month as I travelled to India and London, meeting old and new friends. I was pleasantly surprised when a few people I met recently knew who I was before we met, as they shared my interests and followed me on LinkedIn.

The truth is that 2023 has been my year of finding focus and learning to do less to do more, and I’m grateful that people are noticing. It’s been an intentional journey, and I am now excited to kick into high gear in 2024.

As we close the year, I’m sharing with you three key steps that have helped me:

Set your mission
Commit and pare back
Resist mission creep

I’m also sharing my most-read essays since Reimagining Life & Work launched in August, as well as a recent podcast interview I participated in on Living Life On Your Terms; these resources are sure to help you continue to find your focus and do less to do more in 2024.

Set Your Mission

Halfway through this year, I had an epiphany: I should focus all of my work on supporting people, especially women, to live and work on their terms. I adopted the view that this work—which I fully expect to evolve over time—is my life’s work.

I set a mission that was powerful to me, and
I decided to take the long view - meaning that I intend to grow my impact and portfolio in this mission over a long time. This mindset removed the pressure to achieve immediately and removed any feeling of being tied to specific outcomes.
And I was really excited - every day - about diving into my work.

I had already begun working towards this mission in my role as co-founder and CEO of ExponentialChangemakers, a global network propelling women from early to mid-career, and I was ready to expand my efforts to better leverage all of my expertise.

So, in August, I launched this Substack and began to build out Exponential by Design, my consulting and coaching practice, further.

I was also influenced by others around me; in particular, this question by a well-known coach, Rich Litvin, stuck with me: What is the most uncomfortable conversation you could have to help you move forward?

And that’s when I began to connect widely with people about my new mission. Between mid-August and October:

I connected with former colleagues and friends, including people I hadn’t spoken with in years,
interviewed 15 working professionals in their 40’s-50’s who felt like their professional life was an odyssey,
interviewed 15 new entrepreneurs about their experiences starting out,
asked an entrepreneur I admire to be my mentor and
launched a 100-day breakthrough coaching challenge on LinkedIn.

All of these connections jumpstarted momentum; fun and engaging conversations stimulated new ideas and writing and opened up new opportunities in the form of clients and projects.

In the past few weeks, I’ve reflected on and refined my mission. You see, I want to help people live and work on their terms because I have a radical vision of what the future of work should look like. I have the expertise to help organizations, individuals, and even governments achieve that vision. I’m on a roll and eager to put my passion and experience to work in new ways.

With support from a coach, I’ve leaned into that vision and put it out there. As a result of being even clearer about my mission, I’ve taken bold actions in the past few weeks and engaged in new conversations that are leading to incredibly exciting opportunities and collaborations. Lookout 2024!

Set your mission. Take the long view. Remember your experience and expertise. Lead from your strengths. Take bold actions.

Commit & Pare Back

Two years ago, I moved from central London to Provence. Since then, I’ve significantly pared back my life, which has enabled me to engage more widely and deeply.

You don’t need to live in Provence to start trimming your life back to support your mission.

First, commit to your mission.
Then, commit to yourself to becoming the person and developing the habits, mindsets, and energy that you’ll need to work towards and achieve that mission.
This is about loving yourself enough to consistently show up how you want to pursue your mission with care.

For me, this has meant cutting out professional activities that don’t contribute to my personal mission or life’s work at this time to make room for those that do.

And it means managing myself carefully through healthy habits and monitoring my mindset and energy. This way, I can regularly show up intentionally and as my best self.

I have adopted new eating, exercise, and sleep regimens to support me in physically feeling well each day.
I try to be consistent with habits that work for me: journaling and meditation each day, avoiding too many back-to-back meetings, moving non-meeting conversations into email, and blocking entire days to focus on creative client work, my wealth agenda, or writing, for example.
I am incredibly mindful of my energy, reserving it for clients, projects, writing, ideation and creativity, family, friends and self-care. I use calendar blocking, don’t go out if I am too tired, curb my tendency to be a perfectionist around the house, and check in with my energy levels throughout the day, for example.
I leave space for downtime and recovery after intensive work—plenty of it—so that my mind has time to relax and wander. Most of my time is spent outdoors on walks, in parks, on picnics and adventures—any excuse to be outside is a good one for me, even in the winter.

You’ll also want to invest in yourself. For example, I am investing in learning experiences that support my mission and expand my knowledge base and network.

Resist Mission Creep

With your mission set and a commitment to yourself to follow through, the last hurdle is to resist mission creep.

For me, this means running everything I engage in through the lens of my mission and the commitments I’ve made to myself. I don’t take on projects or clients that don’t align, for example, and I don’t attend or speak at events that just aren’t a fit. Even my reading list is highly curated, so I am regularly diving deeply into materials that are pertinent to my mission. (Thankfully, many topics fit within my mission, so I have quite a varied reading list, which I love.)

You can manage others by being clear with them about your focus and learning to say no to activities that just don’t help you advance your mission.

Resisting mission creep takes discipline and might be hard at first. You may find it helpful to write your mission down, post it somewhere visible, and refer to it when you are making decisions about how to spend your time, energy, or money.

When I set out to find focus and do less to do more, I didn’t have a framework; these steps that I share here have emerged over the past year. My hope is that by boiling down my experiences into three concrete steps, you’ll find a framework that may help you to find focus in 2024.

Set your mission. Take the long view. Remember your experience and expertise. Take bold actions.
Commit to your mission. Commit to yourself; build the habits, mindsets and energy required for you to be at your best while pursuing your mission. Invest in you.
Resist mission creep.

Inspiration

The end of a year is a terrific time to reflect upon and rethink your life and work, and the beginning of a year is a great time to step into new habits, mindsets, and energy that will help you achieve your vision. Below are my most viewed articles and a link to a recent podcast interview where I share what it means to live and work on your terms and how I got there.

Life’s too short to stay stuck, so please reach out if you’d like some help identifying your barriers. I’ll bring new perspectives on what’s holding you back from achieving your vision. There’s always a way to live and work on your terms, even if you can’t see it today – and the first session with me is always complimentary. Learn more about how we might work together.