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Slowing Down to Speed Up
Ever feel like you’re working on everything but getting nothing done? Deadlines slip, costs balloon, and projects linger in a weird limbo of being almost finished but never actually done. Welcome to the mile-wide, inch-deep syndrome – where teams and individuals stretch themselves too thin, making slow progress across too many projects instead of making real progress on fewer of the most important ones.
One culprit? Cognitive overload from constant context switching. Every time we bounce from one project to another, our brains pay a high caloric price. In other words, our finite attention and energy dwindles down until we simply cannot invest additional brain calories. In fact, our brains are hardwired to conserve energy. Protecting that energy for only the most important tasks and focusing on one thing at a time is essential. A study conducted by authors at Harvard Business Review shows that doing less (but better) isn’t just a theory – it’s the smarter way to work. This means that switching between projects and tasks reduces our productivity by 40% or more. That’s almost half your day lost to refocusing instead of executing. Over an entire year, that adds up to roughly five working weeks – 9% of their annual time at work!
The Fix? Do Fewer Things (But, Better)
It might sound counterintuitive, but if you want to achieve more, focus on less.
The key is prioritizing effectively… to get the right things done instead of just getting things done.
1. Prioritize Effectively: Essentialism Over Busyness
Think of your workload like a backpack. If you keep stuffing it with more and more, it gets heavier and harder to carry. Instead, be deliberate about what you pack – only the essentials.
Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less breaks it down simply:
Don’t just ask: Can I do this?
Instead, ask: Should I do this? If it doesn’t serve your main goal, it’s dead weight.
2. Embrace the MVP Mindset
Perfectionism is a trap. The longer you wait for something to be “just right,” the more time and energy it drains. Instead, focus on an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach. Ask yourself:
- What are the must-haves vs. nice-to-haves?
- What can we launch as our 1st, 2nd, and 3rd iterations?
Think about the first iPhone – far from perfect, but functional enough to launch, learn, and improve. Had Apple waited for Face ID, triple-lens cameras, and 5G, they might still be in development mode.
3. Beware of Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Give yourself a week to finish a report, and it’ll take a week. Give yourself a day? You’ll hammer it out before lunch.
The fix? Time-box your work:
- Break down goals into smaller projects or tasks achievable in a specific time frame.
- Set time limits: What can we build this week, this sprint, this month, this quarter?
- Instead of asking, “How long will this take?” ask “How much can we accomplish in this amount of time?”
By working backward from a set deadline, you create urgency and prevent projects from dragging on indefinitely.
Instead of jumping from Idea → Action, try Idea → Plan → Action. The real value isn’t just in having a plan but in the planning itself – the live collaboration and real-time human interaction that allows the best ideas to emerge, where the sum becomes greater than the individual parts. In reality as Susan Scott, author of Fierce Conversations pointed out – no plan survives its collision with reality. Even so, the active planning step is often an invaluable exercise, building alignment and clarity before moving into action; avoiding delays caused by misalignment, unclear priorities, overlap, duplication, and rework.
The key is to plan only enough to achieve lock-step alignment before work begins.
The Bottom Line: Less is More
The solution to mile-wide-inch-deep syndrome isn’t to do more – it’s to do less, but better. To focus on the fewest number of high-impact projects only – release early, gather real-world feedback, iterate often, and intentionally set scope and time constraints to avoid the endless expansion of work and inevitable delays.
Prioritize what really matters and watch your team’s productivity (and sanity) skyrocket.
Learn more about this topic – get our Quick Reference Prioritization Guide here.
Grab our Project Planning Template here.
