and life you love.

Now, if you're tired of feeling over stressed and over stretched and over committed but

you don't know a way out, today's episode is for you.

Kate Northrup is an entrepreneur, best selling author, and mom, who's built a digital empire

that reached hundreds of thousands.

She teaches data and soul-driven practices that help you save time, make more money,

and experience less stress.

Kate's work has been featured by the Today Show, Yahoo Finance, Women's Health, Glamour,

Wanderlust, and more.

Kate runs a membership community called, Origin Collective.

Her second book, Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for

Busy Moms, is available now.

Hi Kate.

Hello.

Oh, it's so good to see you.

It's so good to see you too.

Thanks for coming back on.

Thanks for having me.

The last time you were here, we had you on for B-School alum and you were pregnant with

baby number two.

So pregnant.

I was past the time you were supposed to fly.

Super preggos and you had beautiful Ruby and now you have a new baby, Do Less, which is

amazing.

I have so many things underlined.

You did a brilliant job with this book.

We're going to talk about the title in a minute.

We can go into all of it, actually.

Why this book and why now?

For me in my own life, I wrote this book because I struggled so much with hyper productivity

and an obsession with getting things done and then I had two children and well, the

one kid before I wrote the book but anyway, and I was shocked by the amount of pressure

that my identity had wrapped up in being productive and being busy and I began to look at that

because...

And we'll talk about this later maybe but…

During that pregnancy, I cut my work hours about in half and also during the first year

of motherhood, way even less than that and we had a sick baby, I had postpartum insomnia

and anxiety.

I mean it was a very messy year and yet we have the same results in our business and

so I thought, well if I could get the same results working half this amount, what was

I doing my entire adult life being obsessed with the 40 hour or 50 hour workweek, which

by the way, is completely this arbitrary number that was set up during the industrial revolution

based on how machinery works and it's not evidence-based at all and of course we'll

talk about the evidence that shows the alternative and I think it's so important for women, especially

with rises in adrenal fatigue, heart disease, all of the anxiety.

It's related to stress and stress is obviously related to our obsession with doing but I

am not about sacrificing results.

It's not about lying on the beach and eating bonbons either, unless you want to.

Well I love that.

No, no.

I'm actually not about that.

I don't think our audience is either and I will say, even when I...

First of all, I've known you for years.

We've been friends for a really long time.

I love you, I love your work, and even when I saw the title, I could feel this knee jerk...

Wait, what?

Do less?

What are you talking about, Kate?

Are you going to make me a slothen, you know what I mean?

It was this whole thing happening in my head.

The title itself can be triggering, particularly for ambitious, driven women.

Speak a little bit into that and also for people who might think like, oh, easy for

you to say with all of your...

Is this about getting a nanny and a housekeeper and blah, blah, blah.

Let us know.

Yeah.

Early in the book promotion process I was on a podcast and she started off the podcast

saying, well, I was very surprised to say that I really loved your book and I was like,

okay.

And she said, because I assumed, by the title, I was very triggered by the title, and I assumed

that what you were going to be talking about was exactly that, hiring a nanny, getting

a house cleaner, dah, dah, dah.

And she said, I was raised by a single mom who worked three jobs and I was pleasantly

surprised and thrilled to see that there's nothing you wrote about in this book that

my mother could not have done.

And I wrote it with that in mind because I want people to actually be able to do this

and get really good results, not to diminish their results.

Our culture has raised us to believe that the more we do, the more valuable we are,

and I am still a product of that culture.

I still want to get great results and I know your listeners do, I know most of the world

does.

And so that piece about, it's not about doing...

A lot of people hear do less and they automatically think, do nothing, and it's like, nope.

Just what I mean is, do less of the things that don't matter, do less of the things that

drain you, do less of the things that don't get you results, so you can do more of the

things that energize you, that light you up, that get you amazing results.

That's what it means.

Yeah and it's about meaning too.

I actually highlighted this from the book.

You wrote, the whole purpose of doing less, is to have the experience of having more,

not more stuff, but more meaning in our lives and I thought that really beautifully articulated

what so many of us are craving.

You and I obviously both remember a time when we were running our businesses and social

media didn't exist.

We also remember a time...

I know, I miss those days.

Yeah, in our lives, honestly, when cellphones didn't exist.

I remember a time when the Internet didn't exist and for some of our viewers, that's

not their reality and for many of them, they also...

They're like, hey, I remember further back because we have such a nice diverse age range

that watches the show and I do want to mention this for anyone who this is their first time

being introduced to you and your work, this has been a real evolution for you.

I remember when we first met.

I mean you and I go so far back but you told this story, which was so great, about a person

that you were dating in your early 20s and it was a time when you were really spinning

all of those plates and you were very committed to orchestrating every little bit of your

life and I love it, it was in your relationship and you told him that you really wanted him

to take more of the reigns in your relationship.

What was his response?

He replied, “I would love to, if you would be willing to put them down.”

It was like, oh okay, because there is this idea.

I think it affects women more, I will say, that if we are not doing it, it's not going

to happen and we kind of white knuckle our lives like, oh my God, if I'm not doing all

the things, then everything will fall apart and we just...

My invitation like this ex boyfriend's invitation to me was, to let go of the reigns and just

see what might happen.

Let's see if somebody else might pick them up.

Yeah, no.

I mean I've been guilty of that.

I've talked about this a lot.

I've become more aware of it in probably this time in my life than say earlier but I was

like, if I don't do everything in my career, if I don't do everything as it relates to

my relationship, if I'm not the one orchestrating my family, everything, it's all just going

to fall to pieces and I was doing that and I was diminishing everybody around me.

See?

That's the thing, it's so disempowering and I see it with parents a lot and I do this

myself, so I'm not pointing fingers and I see it in relationship a lot, where we have

this overinflated sense of self importance.

In a way, it's completely egotistical to think that if I don't do it, no one else will or

won't do it as well as I could.

They don't have it all together.

They're not going to get it right.

Yeah and so it squelches our children's growth.

It totally disempowers the people around us, whether you have a team, in your partnership,

your parents, it's awful.

It kills polarity in relationships.

If you are wanting to have that sexy time happen and that chemistry and that spark and

you are just cutting your partner off, not a great way to have that love stay alive.

Yeah like, I don't believe in your ability to do normal adult activities.

That's not sexy.

Not sexy.

I love also how the book is structured.

In the first part, you are really making the case, the philosophy of do less, have more,

and in the second part of the book, there's these 14 bite sized experiments that any woman,

or man, could test for herself.

Let's start with the data piece.

The global research is really leaning us in this direction of doing less.

Two things that I highlighted, one, in some research shared by Harvard Business Review

that you quote, it was stated that very few people, including high performing athletes,

novelists, and musicians, have an ability to be in a high state of concentration for

more than four to five hours a day.

I find that to be true for myself.

I can hit it hard and then I got to take a break or do something else for a little bit

because just grinding doesn't really work and then this was cool.

In Sweden, they're moving to a standard six hour workday and one company found that, news

flash, if you stay off social media and minimize distractions during your work day, less hours

actually doesn't diminish productivity.

I was like, yeah.

Yeah because I mean if...

On average, we get interrupted every 11 minutes and it takes us 25 minutes to get refocused

on what we were doing and so if you do the math, you realize you're spending zero minutes

focused on what you were doing, on average, and our brain, if we don't give ourselves

the break, our brain will actually try to get the break itself by distracting ourselves.

Let's say your three year old doesn't come in or your coworker doesn't come in to distract

you, you'll open another browser tab and start a new task, you'll pick up your phone and

start scrolling, you'll start a new project, you'll distract yourself and so the advice

... The experiment is, what would happen if you actually took a break at the first sign

of fatigue and then came back and of course the data shows that you're way more productive

and you get more done in less time, so then you do have more time to do whatever, meditate

or be...

Lie on the ground.

I don't know what you want to do, exercise.

Yeah, whatever you want to do or be like Kate and I and take a salsa class together, which

is what we did the last time.

We were like, rather than meeting for lunch, let's just go dance, which is what we did.

It was the best.

It was really good.

The do less filter, I love this.

You say, ask yourself, in any area of your life, is there a way I could get the desired

result here with fewer action steps or fewer elements or in less time?

Curious, concrete example from how this has played out in your own life.

Yeah, so in our company, we were spending some energy and time in making these beautifully

designed social media graphics.

It required our designer, I had to write the copy, then the designer did it, then I had

to approve them, then there was this whole communication process that preceded and then

they got scheduled, it was a whole thing, right?

They were gorgeous.

I mean, amazing and we were tracking for analytics and also list growth and they just weren't

performing.

We realized, that's a lot of steps for getting no results on what we're wanting and now I

just take random pictures wherever on my phone and we use those for social and they get so

much more traction and it takes me 15 seconds, as opposed to all the steps and all the money

and all the time we were doing before.

I think this is such an important conversation because what has... what I've observed that

happens now and I've noticed it in myself and I try really hard to catch it before I

go too far down the rabbit whole is, there is a trend or there's something new that bubbles

up or people are starting to use a new platform and then you have that little voice in your

head that goes, I should be doing that too.

Am I going to be left behind if I don't do that too?

And I got to go... and then you get into this kind of rat race and I feel like that's where

many of us are spending too much of our time without actually pressing the pause button,

stepping back and say, A, do I even care about this?