Daily Lab: More is too much

Can random Internet trivia change your life?

Years ago, I’d become frustrated and intimidated by my growing stack of “to-read” books. I’d fallen behind on reading, and I was getting the sensation I was falling behind on my work.

I wasn’t reading enough, I wasn’t learning enough.

And then, somewhere on the Internet, lost now to memory and time, I read a simple fact:

“If you read 25 pages a day, by the end of the year you’ll have read more than 9,000 pages.”

I opened my calculator to confirm and, what do you know, it’s true.

If you read 25 pages a day, in a year you can have read 10, 900-page biographies. Or maybe 40 or so business books. 25 or so novels.

Wow.

In that moment, I realized the secret isn’t to have one big reading vacation like we all hope. It’s not to have “One Big Day” and get through all the reading—or any other task that’s important to us—all at once.

The secret is to do as little as possible, as often as possible.

It’s been years since I read that fact. And, in some of the years since, I’ve read 100 pages a day. Some years—like this one—it’s closer to 15.

But it’s never none.

Maybe reading’s not your thing, but I suspect there’s something you wish you were doing, or could get done.

Maybe it’s your social media posts. Or writing the new copy for your website. Or planning a new service offering. There’s probably something you wish you had time to tackle.

So think about it this way: How little could you do, every single day?

Because, it turns out, if you want to do a lot of things, doing more is too much.

But doing less lets you do lots, forever.