If shedding work is so obviously powerful, why is it so hard? Why did your week fill up with this stuff in the first place, and why does cutting it feel so unnatural? The answer is one of the most quietly important findings in modern psychology, and once you know it you will see it everywhere.

Why do we never subtract?

In 2021, a team led by Gabrielle Adams and Leidy Klotz published a study in Nature with a startling conclusion: people systematically overlook subtraction.1 When we try to improve something, we reach almost automatically for what we can add, and we fail even to consider what we could remove, even when removing is the better answer.

The experiments are concrete. Given a wobbly Lego structure, people added bricks to prop it up rather than removing the one brick causing the wobble. Asked to improve an essay, a recipe, a travel plan, they padded rather than pruned. In one count, participants generated around 1,155 ideas that added something and only 297 that took something away.2 The bias comes from how we search for solutions: adding is the first idea that comes to mind, and we grab it before subtraction ever occurs to us.3

Your calendar did not fill with junk because every meeting and report was necessary. It filled because, at a thousand tiny forks, you and everyone around you reached for “let’s add a check-in” and almost never for “let’s remove one.” Your week is a monument to addition.

How much of it is killable?

More than you would guess. Knowledge workers spend roughly fifty-eight to sixty percent of the day on “work about work”, coordination, search, app-switching, and status updates, and only a quarter to a third on actual skilled work.4 Nearly half of workers admit to performative busywork, looking occupied rather than being productive, with rates higher among those who feel watched.5 A large majority of managers rate their meetings unproductive, and noncritical meetings have been estimated to cost on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per employee per year.6 The prey is big.

What does cutting look like at scale?

When Shopify culled meetings in 2023, removing recurring meetings of three or more people and adding no-meeting Wednesdays, it eliminated around 12,000 meetings, roughly thirty-six years of cumulative time.7 The company even built a calculator showing that a thirty-minute meeting of three people costs hundreds of dollars, with the explicit aim of changing the default answer from yes to no.8 The catch, which Shopify itself reported, is that meetings crept back, which teaches the real lesson: elimination needs a cultural default, not a one-off purge.9

How do you do it yourself?

The encouraging news is that the bias is a failure to consider subtraction, not a refusal of it. In the studies, simply reminding people that removal was an option, with a prompt as light as “you can add or remove”, more than doubled the rate of subtractive solutions.2 The cure is just a cue.

So make this your cue. Take your audit and, for each recurring item, ask the question your mind keeps skipping: not “how do I do this faster?” but “what happens if I stop doing this at all?” Before you remove something, borrow Chesterton’s caution and make sure you know why it was put there in the first place.10 Then cut. You are allowed to remove things. It is a real option, usually the best one, and the only reason it does not feel like it is that your brain is built to overlook it.

Frequently asked questions

How do you eliminate unnecessary work?

Question every recurring task by asking what it is for and who actually needs it, then delete anything that cannot answer. Most of a typical week is low-value coordination and performative work that survives only because no one questioned it.

Why is it so hard to cut work?

Because people systematically overlook subtraction. Research shows we instinctively reach to add steps, checks, and reports rather than remove them, so calendars accumulate junk through a bias that makes the cutting option invisible.

How much of the working week is wasteful?

Estimates vary, but knowledge workers spend roughly 58 to 60 percent of the day on coordination and work about work, and surveys find nearly half admit to performative busywork, suggesting a large share is killable.

About the author

Tom Goodwin

Tom Goodwin is the author of Don’t Work Harder, a book about taking the time AI gives back as time rather than more work. He is a co-founder of GAMEPLAN and writes on productivity, technology, and the economics of the working week.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Gabrielle S. Adams, Benjamin A. Converse, Andrew H. Hales, and Leidy E. Klotz, “People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes,” Nature 592 (2021): 258 to 261. ↩

  2. Adams et al. (2021) and replications: participants generated far more additive than subtractive ideas, and cueing subtraction more than doubled the rate of subtractive solutions. Treat as a strong, replicated tendency rather than an absolute law. ↩ ↩2

  3. Adams et al. (2021) attribute the bias partly to heuristic memory search: additive solutions are more accessible and accepted before subtractive ones are considered. ↩

  4. Asana, Anatomy of Work Index (2021 to 2023): roughly 58 to 60 percent of the day on work about work. Asana sells work-management software, so treat as directional. ↩

  5. Visier, “Productivity Theater” survey (2023): nearly half reported around 1.25 days per week on performative work; 83 percent admitted at least one performative behaviour in the prior year. ↩

  6. Steven G. Rogelberg, The Surprising Science of Meetings (2019): most managers rate meetings unproductive; noncritical meetings cost on the order of 25,000 dollars per employee per year. ↩

  7. Shopify’s 2023 meeting cull, reported by Bloomberg, Fortune, and Axios: about 12,000 meetings removed, roughly 36 years of cumulative time. ↩

  8. Shopify meeting cost calculator (2023), reported by Bloomberg: a 30-minute meeting of three runs 700 to 1,600 dollars; the aim was to change the default from yes to no. ↩

  9. Commentary on the Shopify cull (Axios, Fast Company): cutting meetings works only if the information moves to written channels, and Shopify reported meetings creeping back. ↩

  10. G. K. Chesterton, The Thing (1929): do not take a fence down until you know why it was put up. ↩