How to enjoy more by doing less

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘How to enjoy more by doing less’

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. It is somehow still January, a month that can feel impossibly long and also, maybe relatedly, a month in which many of us are trying to set the tone for the rest of our year. I have friends doing dry January, a month of not drinking. I am personally trying to read more for pleasure and get more sleep. But I recently read a column by my colleague Tim Harford that made me think about how we approach self-improvement. He suggested that often what we’re doing with resolutions is adding something good to our routines, like exercise, or subtracting something we perceive as bad, like processed food or screen time. But what if what we really need to do is just less, overall? How do we talk ourselves into subtracting things that are good? Tim’s beloved column in the FT is called The Undercover Economist. It explores the economic ideas behind the every day. He’s also written 10 books and has two podcasts, so he does a lot. And he’s with me today from London. Tim, welcome. It’s such a pleasure to have you.

Tim Harford
It’s a pleasure to join you. I’m actually joining you from Oxford, but I guess from New York it all seems the same to you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It all seems the same and he’s joining me today from Oxford. So you wrote this column on subtracting stuff. It was inspired by a very popular book from last year, Subtract by Leidy Klotz. And the illustration for that column is just this big, menacing delete key like the one on your keyboard.

Tim Harford
The most important key, right?

Lilah Raptopoulos
It sure is. But the first thing you tell us is that subtracting actually does not come naturally to us. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Tim Harford
Yeah. The way you described your resolutions is, I think, pretty common. Let’s get rid of bad stuff and we’ll do more good stuff. And so I think what’s missing from there, obviously there are loads of resolutions that say I’m going to eat less bad food, for example, I’m gonna stop smoking. But not many resolutions, I’m gonna stop doing something that is worth doing that does add something to my life, but I’ll stop doing it because you can’t do it everything, and there’s only 24 hours in the day. And I think we have a bit of a blind spot for that sort of subtraction. And that’s certainly what Leidy Klotz, his book and his research suggests.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. You gave a couple examples that made me think, “Oh, yes.” You’re totally right about what you call subtraction neglect.

Tim Harford
Yeah. The idea originally came to him when he was playing with Lego with his son, and they had this uneven bridge, and he was like, oh, I need to add some bricks to even up the bridge. And his son just took bricks off the longer leg, rather than he was looking to add bricks to the shorter leg, his son took bricks off the longer leg. He thought, oh yeah, that also solves the problem and it never occurred to him to do that. So that’s just like the spark of inspiration. But when he actually, with his colleagues started researching this idea of subtraction neglect more rigorously, there were some really clear examples. So, for instance, you show people a recipe for soup, the bunch of ingredients. And you say, can you make some suggestions as to how to improve this recipe for soup? And people hardly ever go, well, you know what, maybe less garlic. Or maybe there’s . . . maybe the cream is gonna drown the flavour of the vegetables, take out those ingredients. The suggestions were almost always to add ingredients. And so, hence this idea of subtraction neglect. This idea that it doesn’t even occur to us that maybe we should take stuff away.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, OK. Let’s talk about what this looks like in practice, like in the context of New Year’s resolutions. What are examples of things that we might want to theoretically subtract? Like, for example, you know, have more dinner parties, maybe you don’t need to have more dinner parties. You could have fewer fun dinner parties. Is it things like that?

Tim Harford
Yeah. So it could be . . . I mean, you can look back and it’s very easy to construct this ideal life for yourself that involves doing all this extra cool stuff. But the truth is that if it was that easy, we probably would have been doing it already. And we can improve ourselves. We can change our lives. We can change what we do and how we spend our time. But what we can’t change is the number of hours in the day, the number of days in the week. That’s not gonna change. The fundamental time constraint never changes. Almost automatically, if you’re saying, I want to read more books, your resolution, I want to read more books, implicitly and perhaps unexamined is and therefore I am going to do less of something else. And that’s gonna make time for reading more books. Now, maybe because you’re a very wise woman, maybe you’ve identified the thing that you’re going to do less of. But often I think we’re not very honest with us. So it could be that you’re saying, like, I watch a lot of Netflix, I like Netflix, but you know what, I’m actually going to watch less, and in that time I’m going to read books. Or I read a lot of New Yorker articles. Nope, no more New Yorker. I’m gonna unsubscribe to the New Yorker, and I’m going to use that time to read books, or whatever it is. I think we very often don’t really face up to the ineluctable arithmetic of that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right, right. I like this like cognitive reframing of subtraction as just a reminder to sort of like, I don’t know if you would agree, but almost cut yourself a break. Like, I was thinking about this reading more books resolution, which I do have, is finish more. It was sort of to finish more books because I read like the first third or first half of a lot of books.

Tim Harford
It’s not obvious that that’s the wrong way to do it, but OK, go on.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, right, exactly. So then I read the new Zadie Smith novel, and I liked it, but it was long and I don’t know if I loved it. And I think I would have just been fine reading the first half of it. And I thought, OK, what is, why is my resolution to finish more books? Maybe it’s just read whatever books you want and stop them when you want, like maybe that’s all working fine.

Tim Harford
Yeah, but let’s assume that actually that is a worthwhile resolution. And you really would get something more out of completing more books. You don’t have more hours. You don’t have more time. So at some stage you have to face up to what is it that you’re not going to do. So implicitly, the most obvious by default, unexamined thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna start fewer books. If you’re reading every book a quarter of the way through, you are going to read one-fourth as many books. But you will finish them rather than reading the first quarter of four times as many books. Now, does that sound good?

Lilah Raptopoulos
So don’t pick up, that sounds way better, don’t pick up a new book to start, before you finish . . . 

Tim Harford
Or maybe . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
. . . don’t have four books going at the same time, yeah.

Tim Harford
Or maybe it is something else. Maybe you’re going to spend more time reading books. But then you still have to face up to what is it that you’re gonna spend less time doing. And we’re so dishonest with ourselves about this. And I am, by the way, I’m talking to myself, I’m not talking to anybody else. This is all self-talk. I’m in constant denial of like, oh, I’m just going to be better. And when I’m better, when I’m more efficient, then the time for all of this stuff is just gonna magically appear and of course, it never does.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
So one of the things that I really loved most about your piece is that you were very honest about how you struggle to actually like you’re saying, like you struggle to actually put this into practice, but it’s not, it’s a great idea. But sometimes, intuitively, it’s hard to know what you can cut.

Tim Harford
Yeah. And so I reached out to Leidy Klotz, the author of Subtract, and he said, well, actually, because I said, look, I feel I should be subtracting something from my life, but I don’t know what to subtract. I, you know, I’m in this kind of fierce denial. I make a list of all the stuff I’ve committed to do. I’m like, no, I’m going to do all of it. I’m going to keep kick-boxing and go to the gym, I want to swim. And I’m trying to teach myself tai chi, and I’m trying to improve my piano. And yes, I’m gonna be a better husband, I’m gonna be a better dad. And I will write that 11th book, and I’m going to keep producing my podcast, and I’m going to keep writing my column, and I don’t want to let go of any of it. But I read your book, and so what am I gonna do, you know, what should I subtract? And he basically said, well, you know, even by asking the question, you’re already beyond where most people are. So subtraction neglect is not about refusing to subtract stuff, if subtraction neglect, it doesn’t even occur to you to try and, yeah. I mean, I’m just, I’m still, just like an old man shaking his fist at a cloud sometimes, but yeah, I’ve got to make that choice.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. How did that leave you thinking about this? I mean, like . . . 

Tim Harford
Well, I think it’s . . . it has left me more sensitive to opportunities to do less. So, for example, kick-boxing. So I do kick-boxing two or three times a week, like maybe two times is enough. Maybe it’s OK if that third time when I in principle I could go, maybe I don’t and I stay at home. And I make a risotto or I read a book or something. Maybe that’s OK. So there is some marginal shifting of the ground there. And I’m talking to myself and saying, you know, you don’t need to keep pushing yourself every single time. It’s not weakness of will or laziness if you don’t go, maybe it in fact is carving out more space to do something else that you want to do. But, I mean, I’m pretty stubborn, to be honest.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, I, one thing that also your column made me think about is how, like, no matter what your goal, the wall that you can run into at the end of this as you sort of strip down some of the other things in your life is, is work. Like it’s hard to cut down work. A lot of us have been able to cut down our commutes a little bit after Covid, that’s good. But then simultaneously, on the other side of that, there’s all this discourse right now and there’s all these books right now about how it’s sort of untenable that we’re expected to be so productive and work so much, and we’re all racing towards burnout. And it leaves me kind of wondering what is to be done here. Like, how do we balance these things?

Tim Harford
It’s not easy. And you do wonder, so it’s true that the shock of Covid did save, you know, a lot of commuting time. But at the same time, it blurred the boundaries even more than they were already blurred, and they were already blurred, between leisure and work. And this sort of constant possibility of checking your email, checking Slack, messaging your boss, doing a little bit of kind of productive leisure time. That I think really exploded during Covid time. But what I’ve tried to do myself is to turn that around and to push back and to say, well, hang on, if Covid allowed work to just bleed into all of my evenings, it made me realise that what the thing that was preventing my work bleeding into the evenings before Covid was, I was going out, had commitments, you know, I was supposed to be going to the gym, or I was supposed to be going to the theatre, and that’s why I stopped working. Well, you can turn that around. You can push back, you can say, well, hang on, I can, these days, many of us, we’re not all in this privileged position, but many of us could arrange to go to the gym at 11 o’clock or to have a lunchtime yoga session or to go to a matinee. I mean, those, as long as you’re getting your job done. If you’re checking your email at 6:00 in the morning and you’re replying to your boss at 11:00 at night, maybe it’s OK if also you go swimming at 2:00 in the afternoon like that. So we’ve got to negotiate this with ourselves, especially knowledge workers like you and me and many of the people listening to this. We’re in this kind of curiously privileged position. We’ve had unrivalled control over how we spend our time, but at the same time, unprecedented ambiguity, which allows us to beat ourselves up in all kinds of new ways.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Tim, do you think that this is about productivity? Like, do you believe that we can be more productive if we rest more, if we take time for activities we find fulfilling, if we do less? Or is this about something else?

Tim Harford
I mean, yeah, maybe it’d be more productive if you took more rest or did this or that, but that doesn’t really seem to be. I think it’s a mistake to instrumentalize it in that way. Maybe we should take more rest because, you know, we don’t rest enough. And that rest is worthwhile in and of itself. There is a trap in everything being for the sake of getting more work done in the end. Like you should go on holiday because you’ll get so much more done when you come back from holiday. I mean, that seems to me to misunderstand the point of a holiday. Maybe not from the point of view of your boss, but maybe from the point of view of yourself. So some stuff has to be worth doing for its own sake, doesn’t it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. My last question, Tim, is just whether, like, ultimately, you . . . even though it was hard for you to take things off your list, whether you do agree with this premise that we need to do fewer things, even if it means we give up on some things we like, do you feel that way, or was this more of a thought experiment for you?

Tim Harford
I mean, I accept the premise intellectually, but I am clinging on for dear life to all of the things that I have promised myself I’m going to get done in the first quarter of 2024. As I’ve said, I’m stubborn. So for me, the changes are quite marginal. They’re just giving myself a little bit of permission here and there. But I think it’s always worth reminding ourselves that everything we do gets in the way of everything else that we do. And in particular, gets in the way of all the things we’re not going to do because we’re too busy doing the things we are doing. And carrying that in the back of your mind that it is possible to just stop and do something else, or maybe just relax, is an option. I think, I’m thinking more clearly from having reminded myself of that option, even if I’m not currently taking the option.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Well, we’ll take that with us. Tim, this was such a delight. Thank you so much.

Tim Harford
It’s an honour to be a guest. So thank you so much.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s an honour to have you. Thanks.

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That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I highly recommend you check out the show notes. We have links in there to everything that we talked about. All of the links in the show notes will get you past the paywall on FT.com. We also have discount codes for a subscription to the FT. And as always, ways to keep in touch with me and with the show on email, X and Instagram.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.