Don't Do Extra Work
"Fuck if I know, cut out dairy."
Everybody gets angry about doing extra work. I think this is a nice thing to be angry about.
Once upon a time, there was a doctor who was angry at me because I made him do extra work.
I called him about some labs. He told me they were already mailed to me.
I had changed my address and never got them.
“Well they’re all clear anyway. Bye.”
“Wait — if they’re all clear — is there anything I should do?”
“I don’t know. Try cutting out dairy.”
He hung up.
I kept thinking about this.
I knew his suggestion was off-the-cuff enough, but it was a suggestion.
It was mean and fast, so I don’t know why I took it so seriously. Maybe because in his annoyed state it was still the first generally-applicable suggestion that came to his mind. Maybe cutting out dairy helped many people before and so that’s why he was thinking about it.
It was also a suggestion I hadn’t tried.
I started looking up replacements for all the things I liked. Ice cream was easy enough, said the internet, because there are lots of nice vegan alternatives. Cheese is hard though. Apparently this is the aspect of cutting out dairy that people find the hardest. Vegans miss cheese. The fake cheeses that have the right texture are hard to find.
I spent a few hours on this activity, and worked in my notebook, making a little list of items and their replacements that I would be happy with.
At some point in the later stage of this process I noticed that I drank three glasses of milk in a day.
I put my list down and had the thought—
before I make all the tricky replacements,
before I give up cheese
and do the hardest thing
what if—
what if I just
drink less milk
three tall glasses of milk is kind of
a lot
maybe?
I had no idea, but that was the biggest single source of dairy that I consumed.
What if instead of doing a lot of hard things to cut out
all dairy
I drank
one glass of milk
instead of
three
Cutting out that much dairy did end up being good advice for me. It did make a lot of issues I had go away.
But what had stood out to me in this situation is that it was not necessary at all for me to cut out all dairy or even anything I liked. I just decreased the thing I was doing most by some percent.
It required basically no strategy or discipline to implement.
Doing the easy intervention had high impact.
It worked even better than the 80/20 rule.
I like to come up with useful, granular things that help people solve problems at the level of complexity where the solution would work. Often the problem is complex, and the solution isn’t — but you still have to think about the complexity of the problem to find the spot where a solution would make the impact you want. Donella Meadows calls these spots leverage points. She wrote a cool book you can read here, Thinking in Systems.
Often when people tell you a solution when they notice something wrong or when you ask, they tell you in the format of telling you a whole solution (something broad and totalizing, like “cut out dairy”) that is likely to work for a lot of people.
(An example of this in a different field, is hormonal birth control. It is dosed to work for any sized woman. It is totalizing and complete in this way. But this also means that it is hard on a lot of women’s systems and comes with side effects.)
That’s because they actually don’t have the full complexity of your problem in their mind enough to find the leverage points to tell you something more narrow.
So they tell you their advice, and it tends to be both the most general and most complete version.
In some ways this is good. If you follow it exactly it will work. If you don’t follow it exactly, the person giving you advice didn’t give you any bad advice. If you want to go in the direction of the advice, but include your own caveats, you are free to figure that out.
But some people have perfectionist tendencies. Some people like to try a solution perfectly, in the spirit of doing a very rigorous test on if the solution works.
People who are working on their hardest problems, or on something very important to them, they tend to develop perfectionist tendencies even if they are not usually perfectionists. Their hope-risk emotions get messy.
This post is for those people in those situations to explain why there are already artifacts in the advice given, such that following it exactly often already isn’t necessary (and such that, not following it exactly doesn’t mean you’re messing it up).
Often enough, you can figure out if you have to do the full, hard version, or if there is an easier version you can do that works well for you specifically.
There are situations where this is likelier to work.
Situations where this works well
When you’re unsure of the problem’s complexity
You don’t know what’s going on, so doing “less of what you’re doing a lot of” or “more of what you’re doing very little of” following either some heuristics for how things are expected to work or something like a general recommendation you trust
When there are multiple contributing factors
Doing the biggest, easiest thing can give you more energy for the smaller issues, or some of the smaller issues will start to resolve themselves
When you’re already prone to perfectionism
If you are perfectionist about other things, it is possible you apply perfectionism to problem solving and troubleshooting, even when it is not necessary or the perfectionism is keeping you from the flexibility needed to make positive changes
When the cost of total compliance is high, but there is no or low cost to partial compliance
Sometimes there are good reasons you can’t do the “total” thing. There are high costs or other things you need to function take a hit. You really can’t afford the total thing, for whatever reason, but there is small or no cost to doing some aspect.
(e.g. going to a dance class once a week to see if you like it and stay in shape, versus moving to New York City to join a professional dance academy.)
When advice from professionals is overly general or totalizing
They have to sell solutions. That means if their solution doesn’t work for you, they haven’t fulfilled whatever promise or guarantee they have. Or in the case of legal professionals or doctors, they have liability they have to think about. This means they are already editing their advice to be more intense
There are also situations where this works less well. The perfectionists would know this. The trick is to be able to identify, when you have a block in problem solving, which category the situation is actually in.
Situations where this works less well or not at all
When the system has threshold effects
Sometimes, issues only improve only after a certain threshold is crossed, and a “state shift” occurs. Certain medical issues (such as eating spinach for gut issues) get better after consistency for a long time
When there’s a short window of opportunity
Sometimes doing the hard thing is what is needed for the results you need in a specific time frame. The situations I imagine are scenarios where you may want to prevent a state change by taking actions in a system, such that the system responds to a different thing with your change in it
When you had precommitted to a system with greater constraints than usual
If you have a precommitment, then elements outside of the system you are in can have unpredictable or disproportionate effects that can be hard to track down and mess with your plans
An example is if you are doing the keto diet, occasionally eating just a few extra carbs means you are no longer doing keto — without the keto putting your body in a fat-burning mode, the fats you are eating could easily add up to too many calories, and then that could cause you to gain weight
Situations with binary outcomes
Small failures or errors can lead to total failure
From my experience, the number of situations that people get into in the second category is generally not that many, and if they are in situations like that, it is limited to a certain specific social group, a certain project, a certain workplace, a certain set of tasks they are responsible for, or a certain goal they want to reach.
For a lot of different things, you have a lot more flexibility than you think you do!
And then you can be less tired and spend more of your intense perfectionism energy where it really counts.