Last week, you got a chance to see how you can progress in or maintain your fitness and diet goals despite being busy. But what if you’re already doing all of those things and you’re still racing around to get everything done? What if you’re struggling despite following those tips? The answer to your plight may not be what you think it is. I’m going to tell you something that you, as a hard-working go-getter, absolutely do not want to hear. Ready? Do less. Please, put away the torch and pitchfork and hear me out.

First, we’ve got to understand a few things about stress and how your body reacts to it. Your body is incredibly smart. It has all kinds of ways to deal with things threats in your environment (which includes other humans.) What counts as a threat? It can be anything from it being cold outside to a difficult workout to being chased by a hungry lion to having a project due tomorrow. Those things are all stressors and your body will react and prepare to deal with them, then adapt. That’s great news because it’s what saved you from being eaten by a lion in the good old days.

However, your body doesn’t have an infinite stress-handling capacity. It needs time to recover so it can adapt. Think of your body as a big glass bottle that can hold stress. Now think of all the different sources of stress (your job, family, workouts, lions, etc.) in your life as taps that you can go to and fill the bottle with. The thing to remember, though, is that once the bottle is full, it’s full. It doesn’t know the difference between relationship stress and job stress. You can’t say “But I didn’t put any workout stress into it. Can’t I still put that in?” No, you can’t. If you put any more stress in, at best it’ll just overflow and do nothing. More likely, it’ll put extra pressure on the bottle. Keep putting things in over a long period of time and the bottle will start to crack. Ignore the cracks, keep putting things in, and the bottle will break. We call this burnout. If you’ve ever burnt-out, you know how awful it feels and how long it takes to recover from.

So you see why, if your plate is already full, doing more isn’t the way to go when it comes to hitting the goals. To make progress, you’ll have to subtract things. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you have to leave your family and quit your job to pursue your fitness. It means that we’ll have to cut out the fluff, be intentional, and focus on quality instead of quantity. Let’s look at a few strategies to help you deal with this.

Prioritizing. Of course, prioritizing might be the best place to start. I don’t remember where I saw it, but somebody drew a chart with importance on one axis and urgency on the other. There are four quadrants: urgent and important (writing my article for this week, training my client at 4pm,) important and not urgent (reading fiction books, having healthy relationships with loved ones, developing the business,) urgent and not important (filing my taxes this week, changing the oil in my car tomorrow,) not important and not urgent (reading the news, learning how to play the ukulele, eating celery.) What’s urgent is kind of obvious: stuff with deadlines that are getting close. What’s important, however, depends on you. For some people, reading fiction is important to them. Others don’t give a monkey’s toss what made-up people are doing on paper. One thing should be pretty apparent, though. If something isn’t urgent and it doesn’t matter to you, stop doing it. If scrolling through social media doesn’t turn your crank, stop and do something from one of the other boxes. Avoid the last box like the plague and spend as much time as possible in the first two. For the next week, whenever you’re doing something, ask yourself if it falls into the last box. You might be surprised to realize how much time you’re putting into that quagmire.

If you’re not a fan of that, try this exercise that allegedly comes from Warren Buffett. Yes, that Warren Buffett. Make a list of the top 25 things you want to achieve. This might take a while. Once you’ve got that, choose the top five that you want to achieve the most or are the most important to you. Great, now that you’ve done that, see the remaining 20? Do not do them. The reason is that it’s easier to distract ourselves with “kind of important” things and delude ourselves into thinking we’re being productive. At least with watching people faceplant on tiktok we have no delusions that we’re wasting time.

Delegating. If you’ve ever held a managerial position, this should be familiar to you. This is the part where you take a thing you either don’t know how to do, don’t have time to do, or just plain hate and have somebody else do it. By hiring me to train you or coach your nutrition, you’re delegating. Instead of you having to think of what your workouts or diet will look like, you have me worry about it for you. You just walk in, do it, suffer… I mean, have a good time, and walk out. Now the only stress involved in working out comes from the actual workout. There are plenty of other ways people delegate. Hiring a cleaner is one of them. Automating their savings or investment contributions is another. Why not take this tried and true business tactic and put it toward other areas of life? Maybe not with raising your kids, though. They’ll probably miss you.

Minimum effective dose. I am far from the first person to suggest this. Tim Ferris rightfully gets a lot of credit for popularizing it. You may already be familiar with it, but, if not, it just means the minimum amount of time/energy/resources/etc. needed to get you the bulk of the results you’re after. Think “do the thing that gives you the most bang for your buck.” If spending three hours in the gym a week will get you to build muscle, why spend six hours there? If you are losing weight while only eating 200 calories fewer than normal, why eat 400 calories fewer? True, you could progress faster by being in the gym longer or by eating 400 calories fewer. But the rate of return is lower. You’re doubling the effort, but you wouldn’t be getting double the reward. Since you probably don’t plan on being elite level in a sport, there’s no need to have a Malcolm X approach (”by any means necessary.”) There are all kinds of ways to do minimum effective dose in training. Stay tuned for some of those workouts.

As you’ve noticed, all of these things center around doing less, not more. It’s completely counterintuitive, but it works. In our modern lives we’re always racing to get more done, achieve more, learn more, see more, and have more. The problem is that we often end up burnt-out and doing many things badly and nothing well. I coach a 14 year old boy and one of the things I try to help him understand is that quality trumps quantity. Five things done well is better than 15 things done poorly. Especially when it’s the right five things.