Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less

"Dufu is a writer and a leadership expert, and what I like about this book is that on the one hand, there’s something very American about it—something very ‘you can do anything that you set your mind to!’, but that on the other hand, it’s channelled through this thing that is very close to my heart—this point about accepting the truth about finitude and limitation. It also brings in the gender aspect of all this that needs mentioning—that impossible demands tend to be made in a very particular way of women . There’s a sense in some of the classic books of time management—generally by men—that they rest on the assumption that you don’t need to worry about keeping the house that you live in clean, or that you have power to determine the length of your work day, but only because others are taking care of the kids, and so on. And even putting aside the war of the sexes aspect, there are lots of time management books that seem to assume you have secretaries or even servants to keep everything going. “Getting more efficient at tasks just causes the standard you’re trying to reach to drift higher and higher” This book is partly about getting men in heterosexual relationships to do their fair share, but also about the idea that, if you make an exhaustive list of all the things that you feel that are on your plate as a family, there might be a whole bunch that nobody should do at all. Hence the title. The assumption that just because you can think of something that seems to need doing, you therefore need to find somebody with the capacity to do it—that’s what this book throws into question. There’s no reason to believe that a list of ‘things that seem to need doing’ is going to be well-fitted to human capacities to actually get things done. There are also all kinds of weird effects built into work and efficiency—including the housework context—where getting better at them just causes the standard you’re trying to reach to drift higher and higher. There’s really fascinating work by a historian called Ruth Schwartz Cowan , about how vacuum cleaners and washing machines basically didn’t save any time at all, because the standards of cleanliness rose to offset the benefits. It soon became a moral obligation to keep the carpet spotless, because you could. So I really like this book’s focus on finitude, and the idea that a well-lived life doesn’t involve making an arbitrarily long list of everything that could possibly need doing, then finding a way to get through it all. Clearly the message of the book, in this context, is tailored towards an audience of women. But I do think there’s a levelling between the sexes going on, in the sense that nobody is immune from these patterns of work creating more work. I mean, it speaks to me too, because I do think of myself as a recovering extreme perfectionist. I’m averse to the idea that perfectionism is something to be sneakily proud of, because it totally screwed me up for a long time. It didn’t have an upside. So it might be something that more women than men feel, but I felt it! Right. I think this book is also aimed at people who can pay people to do certain things—that’s a mark of some kind of privilege. But on the other hand, there are times when the cost/benefit is the right one, and if you can afford a cleaner to come to your house, there are many contexts where that might be the most sensible way to handle your limited resources. Or, say, giving up any hope of your garden and patio ever looking like something from Homes & Gardens is really empowering, because you decided in the beginning not to succeed at that, rather than struggling to fit it in and being dismayed when you fail."