I cut my weekly output in half at the start of this quarter. Not because I was burned out – though I was getting close – but because the numbers stopped making sense. More content, less engagement. More commitments, less progress. The math was off, and I’d been ignoring it.
Most productivity advice is designed for teams. More people, more output, more throughput. When you’re solo, that logic breaks down fast. You’re not a pipeline. You’re a person with a laptop and a finite number of good hours per day.
This is the case for doing less on purpose – and why it might be the most productive shift you make this year.
The energy budget no one talks about
There’s a resource in solo business that gets almost no attention: energy.
Not time. Not ideas. Not motivation. Energy – the actual cognitive and creative capacity you bring to each task on a given day. It’s finite. It doesn’t scale. And unlike a team, you don’t have anyone to absorb the overflow.
Every commitment you carry costs energy. Not just when you’re doing the work, but before and after – in the planning, the context-switching, the low-grade anxiety of knowing it’s on your list. A weekly newsletter, a podcast, a social media cadence, client work, admin – each one draws from the same account.
The problem is that most solopreneurs operate as if they have a team’s capacity. They build systems designed for an org chart of one, stack obligations like they have a bench of people to pick up the slack, and then wonder why everything feels heavy by Wednesday.
That gap between perceived capacity and real capacity is where burnout lives. Not in any single task, but in the accumulated weight of too many of them.
The volume trap
When growth stalls, the default instinct is to do more. Publish more often. Show up on another platform. Add a content format. Launch a thing.
It feels productive. New activity creates a sense of momentum, and momentum feels like progress. But activity and traction are not the same thing.
I’ve watched this pattern in my own work. Weeks where I shipped four pieces of content felt busy. But when I looked at the actual numbers – reads, replies, conversions – they weren’t much different from weeks where I shipped two. Sometimes worse. The extra output was diluting the quality of each individual piece, and the audience could tell.
There’s a harder truth underneath this, too. Volume can become a hiding strategy. When you’re constantly shipping, you don’t have to stop and ask whether the work is landing. You don’t have to sit with the discomfort of a piece that didn’t connect. You just move on to the next one.
Staying busy is easier than being honest about what’s working.
What intentional reduction actually looks like
This isn’t about working less. I want to be clear on that. It’s about committing to fewer things so that each one gets the energy it actually needs.
At the start of this quarter, I went from four weekly outputs to two. Same total work hours – roughly – but distributed differently. Here’s what changed.
Each piece got more research time. Not dramatically more, but enough that I was writing from a better foundation instead of rushing to fill a slot. Engagement went up. Not because the topics changed, but because the depth did. Replies got more specific. Shares increased. The work was landing differently because I wasn’t spreading myself across too many things at once.
Context-switching dropped significantly. That part surprised me. I didn’t realize how much energy I was losing just from bouncing between different content types, platforms, and mental modes. Fewer commitments meant longer stretches of focused work on fewer things – and the quality reflected it.
I also ran what I now think of as a cancellation audit. I looked at every recurring commitment – every weekly task, every standing obligation – and asked a simple question: is this still earning its slot? Not “is this good?” or “could this theoretically help?” but: given what it costs me in energy, is the return worth it?
Three recurring tasks didn’t survive that question. I cancelled them. Not delegated, not paused. Cancelled.
Nothing broke.
How to run your own reduction
If this resonates, here’s a practical way to test it. Not a framework. Not a system. Just three steps you can run this week.
First, list every recurring commitment. Everything you do on a weekly or monthly cadence – content, meetings, admin tasks, platforms you maintain. Write them all down. Most people are surprised by how long the list is.
Second, score each one on two dimensions: energy cost and actual return. Energy cost is how much it drains you, including the invisible overhead of planning and context-switching. Actual return is what it measurably produces – not what it might produce, not what it produced a year ago. What it’s doing now.
Third, cut or pause the bottom 20% for one quarter. Not forever. Just long enough to see what happens.
Here’s the thing that makes this work: most things you cut won’t be missed. Not by your audience. Not by your clients. Not by anyone. The recurring task that felt essential was probably essential once, six months ago, when you started it for a reason that no longer applies.
This isn’t about being lazy or lowering your standards. It’s about being honest with yourself about where your energy creates the most value – and having the discipline to protect that.
The treadmill test
I keep coming back to one question when I evaluate my own systems: does this require constant pressure to function?
If it does, it’s not a system. It’s a treadmill. And treadmills work great until you need to step off – which, if you’re solo, you will. An illness, a slow week, a life event. The things that don’t pause just because your business needs attention.
The most productive quarter I’ve had started with cancelling things. Not adding them. Not optimizing them. Removing them entirely and watching what happened to the things that remained.
They got better. Every single one.
If your current setup only works when you’re operating at full capacity, that’s worth paying attention to. Because full capacity isn’t a plan. It’s a countdown.
