Less Doing, More Living

How often do you feel like you’re racing through your days—busy but not truly productive? In Less Doing, More Living, Ari Meisel challenges the modern obsession with constant work and offers a radically refreshing alternative: you can achieve more by doing less. His philosophy isn’t about laziness; it’s about efficiency, automation, and freedom. The book’s central argument is that by optimizing how we work, automating repetitive tasks, and outsourcing what doesn’t require our unique touch, we can reclaim our most precious resource—time—and use it to live fully.

After being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, Meisel realized that his stress levels and scattered lifestyle were draining him. Through experimentation, he found a system for reducing stress not by doing more, but by doing less, better. The system revolves around three key principles: Optimize, Automate, and Outsource. Each step progressively removes friction from your life, freeing you to focus on what truly matters.

The Core Philosophy: Optimize, Automate, Outsource

Optimization means trimming the fat—simplifying processes until only the essential remains. Meisel compares this process to creating Ikea-style instructions for your life: every task should be broken down into its smallest, clearest steps. Once optimized, automation comes next. This can take many forms, from using digital tools to set reminders to employing systems like IFTTT (If This, Then That) to trigger actions automatically. Finally, anything that can’t be automated should be outsourced—to a virtual assistant, a specialized freelancer, or even a service like TaskRabbit. This layered approach builds a self-sustaining ecosystem that runs smoothly with minimal mental clutter.

The ultimate goal isn’t perfection—it’s flow. When every task is streamlined and delegated, your mind becomes lighter and freer to focus on creativity, rest, and connection. Meisel describes this as moving from “entrepreneurial firefighting” to “architectural living”—a shift from reacting to designing.

Nine Fundamentals for Less Doing

Meisel structures his philosophy around nine fundamentals that apply to every area of life:

• The 80/20 Rule: Find and focus on the small fraction of activities that produce the majority of your results.
• Creating an External Brain: Use technology to store and organize information outside your head.
• Customization: Tailor your tools and systems to fit your specific needs.
• Choose Your Own Workweek: Define your ideal work rhythm instead of living by societal defaults.
• Stop Running Errands: Eliminate low-value, time-draining tasks.
• Finances: Automate and track your money to remove unnecessary effort and anxiety.
• Organization: Set upper and lower limits to prevent clutter and indecision.
• Batching: Group similar tasks together for maximum momentum.
• Wellness: Build a foundation of fitness, sleep, and nutrition to support everything else.

Each principle functions as part of a chain reaction. When you optimize one area, it cascades improvements into others. For instance, organizing your email through automation tools not only clears mental space but also makes delegation and batching easier. The result is exponential—not incremental—efficiency.

Why It Matters

We live in what Meisel calls “a culture of busy.” Many people confuse activity with achievement. But as authors like Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek) have shown, success often comes not from doing more, but from focusing on less. By combining Ferriss’s 80/20 mindset with modern technology, Meisel takes the idea further. He creates a blueprint for a self-managed life—one where you aren’t the bottleneck of your own success.

The implication is profound: less doing isn’t just about productivity; it’s about well-being. By reclaiming time and reducing stress, you enhance creativity, relationships, and health. Meisel’s personal story—overcoming chronic illness by optimizing his stress and workload—underscores that this approach isn’t luxury; it’s survival.

In the chapters that follow, we’ll explore how Meisel’s system works in depth: how the 80/20 Rule uncovers what truly matters, how to build a digital “external brain” that remembers everything for you, how customization and automation tools can liberate your schedule, and how wellness ties everything together. Ultimately, Less Doing, More Living invites you to stop chasing productivity metrics and start designing a life that actually feels rich in time, energy, and meaning.

Ari Meisel begins by grounding his “Less Doing” philosophy in the legendary Pareto Principle—the 80/20 Rule. First observed by economist Vilfredo Pareto, it states that 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of efforts. Meisel’s twist: this principle can free you not just from wasted time but from wasted energy. Rather than doing everything, he urges you to identify the few activities that bring the greatest returns and let go of the rest.

From Tim Ferriss to Your Daily Life

Like Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, Meisel’s focus is optimizing how we spend limited time. Whether in business, relationships, or health, the key is tracking. You can’t optimize what you don’t measure. RescueTime, for example, tracks your digital behavior, revealing where your hours actually go. This data becomes your mirror—it might shock you to learn you spend three hours a day in email or social media loops. Awareness is the first step toward change.

Once you know where your effort yields the highest payoff, you can double down. For instance, one of Meisel’s clients discovered that only 15 percent of his meetings led to meaningful outcomes. By cutting 85 percent of meetings, he reclaimed ten hours a week without harming results.

Building the “Manual of You”

Tracking feeds into optimization. Meisel introduces a surprisingly powerful exercise: create your own “Manual of You.” Take a process you perform regularly—like writing reports or handling client requests—and document each step in exact detail, as if training someone else to do it. When one client mapped out a 10-page procedure, Meisel helped him cut it down to 11 concise steps without losing quality. The goal is clarity so sharp that the task could be automated or outsourced tomorrow.

This process of documentation also exposes inefficiencies we miss simply because we’ve “always done it that way.” When Meisel delegated a nine-step process for issuing student discount codes, he discovered missing instructions only after assistants pointed out gaps. Revising the process multiple times led to a streamlined, foolproof workflow anyone could complete.

Essential vs. Optional

For Meisel, success means knowing the difference between what’s essential and what’s optional. He applies this even to personal pleasures like reading blogs: among hundreds of sources, he uses an RSS app like Feedly to divide them into two folders. The 20 essential reads deliver maximum insight; the rest are leisurely options to enjoy if time allows. This prevents guilt about “not keeping up” and ensures uninterrupted focus on what actually matters.

Advanced 80/20: The Energy Equation

Once efficiency becomes habitual, Meisel proposes a radical shift: spend only 20 percent of your energy on work, and 80 percent on rest and self-improvement. Though counterintuitive, he argues that rest feeds performance. Investing energy in recovery—through sleep, learning, and mindfulness—makes the next burst of work dramatically more effective. This echoes research by performance expert Jim Loehr, who also found that renewal fuels sustainable excellence (see The Power of Full Engagement).

“Efficiency isn’t about squeezing more hours from your day; it’s about aligning effort with impact.” – Ari Meisel

Ultimately, living by the 80/20 Rule transforms how you evaluate success. It moves you from the illusion of being “busy” to the satisfaction of being effective. When you measure your inputs and outputs precisely and commit to spending energy only where results thrive, you begin to experience what Meisel promises: doing less—but truly living more.

Imagine if your brain could focus entirely on creativity while a second brain managed your tasks, reminders, and random thoughts. That’s precisely what Ari Meisel means by creating an External Brain. The basic idea is simple but revolutionary: stop relying on memory. Instead, use technology to remember for you, freeing mental bandwidth for high-value thinking.

Why Memory Fails and Stress Builds

Our mental RAM is finite. Every “Don’t forget to…” uses up valuable space that could be used for problem-solving or creativity. Meisel illustrates this point with humor: chanting a phone number over and over may keep it in view temporarily, but it crowds out more meaningful thoughts. By externalizing information—notes, reminders, ideas—you preserve focus. The result? Less stress, better recall, and greater innovation.

Tools for Your Second Brain

Start with Evernote, Meisel’s core recommendation. Evernote acts as a digital filing cabinet for everything: handwritten notes, photos, scanned documents, voice memos, even web pages saved with the Web Clipper. Because its search function scans text inside images and PDFs, retrieval is instantaneous. Meisel calls this “a backup of your brain.” When he researches an article, Evernote even cross-references old notes—resurfacing ideas he’d forgotten about but that suddenly fit the new project perfectly.

Other tools expand this external memory network. FollowUp.cc schedules automatic email follow-ups. Re:snooze re-delivers monthly reminders. HassleMe sends friendly, randomized nudges (“Call Mom roughly every 5 days”). These systems act together like synapses in your digital brain.

Killing the To-Do List

One of Meisel’s most radical declarations: “Your to-do list is destroying you.” In his view, traditional lists create anxiety because they blend actionable tasks with vague projects (for example, “write book”). Instead, move every item into the right time and context—using email reminders, automation, or delegation. The Zeigarnik effect—the human unrest from unfinished business—disappears when every item has a scheduled path to completion.

From Inbox to Flow

An uncluttered inbox is crucial to mental clarity. Meisel’s two-folder system—Essential and Optional—keeps attention focused on what matters. With simple filters (like removing all emails containing “unsubscribe”), you automatically route distractions away. Paired with follow-up tools, this transforms your inbox into an action queue rather than a guilt trap. Gmail’s Email Game or IFTTT integrations even gamify the process so clearing messages becomes fast and rewarding.

Delegation and Virtual Assistants

Your external brain isn’t complete without other minds. Meisel insists everyone should experience working with a virtual assistant (VA). Platforms like Fancy Hands (on-demand VAs) and Zirtual (dedicated assistants) teach you how to delegate clearly. Learning to communicate step-by-step descriptions forces better processes—a.k.a. creating your “Manual of You.” Eventually, you can even automate your outsourcing, using IFTTT to email tasks to a VA when specific triggers happen (a new blog post, for instance).

Your external brain is more than storage—it’s a living system that adapts, learns, and scales your mental power.

When you fully embrace this idea, life changes. You stop being the bottleneck of your own productivity. Every reminder, idea, or task has a safe home outside your head. What remains inside is focus, clarity, and creativity—the foundations of doing less and living more.

If time is your most valuable currency, why let society dictate how you spend it? Ari Meisel’s principle of “Choose Your Own Workweek” invites you to redefine what a workweek means on your own terms. Inspired by Tim Ferriss’s contrarian Four-Hour Workweek, Meisel takes the concept further: you can—and should—design when you work, not just how much you work.

Breaking Free from the 9-to-5 Myth

Your ideal rhythm depends on when you’re most productive. Meisel shares his own evolution: after years of standard five-day workweeks, he compressed his client interactions to Tuesdays and Wednesdays, between 10 AM and 4 PM. Surprisingly, his productivity skyrocketed. Concentrated, high-energy days proved more effective than diffused effort over five days. Each week became a “five-day weekend” where he could focus on family, creative work, and restorative activities.

Batching interactions also trained his clients to be efficient. By restricting communication windows, he unintentionally forced others to respect his structure, creating mutual focus. This aligns with Parkinson’s Law—the idea that “work expands to fill the time available.” Compress work, and you raise intensity while freeing time.

Tools for Time Autonomy

Two digital tools make this feasible. ScheduleOnce lets others book meetings through a controlled interface—it only displays the times you choose, such as your two designated workdays. This eliminates the email ping-pong that normally takes seven messages to schedule one meeting. Meanwhile, Right Inbox for Gmail delays deliveries, tracks opens, and reminds you to follow up. For example, you can write Friday afternoon emails but schedule them to send Monday morning, preserving boundaries without appearing unresponsive.

Mastering Timing and Boundaries

Choosing your own workweek isn’t about rigidity—it’s about control. The system is flexible enough for exceptions, yet disciplined enough to protect focus. Once clients see that your limited windows simply mean “book next week,” the awkwardness of saying no disappears. The principle also applies beyond traditional work. You can batch creative sessions, fitness training, or even errands into designated time slots. Structure creates freedom.

When you reclaim your calendar, you reclaim your life. Time isn’t something to be managed—it’s something to be designed.

Ultimately, Meisel’s “Choose Your Own Workweek” challenges the notion that productivity equals presence. Efficiency thrives in focused bursts, not endless availability. Discovering your rhythm—morning or night, three days or five—helps you build a schedule aligned with energy, not obligation. That’s how you move from surviving the week to truly living through it.

Running errands might make you feel productive, but Ari Meisel argues it’s an illusion. Errands are traps of inefficiency—repetitive, time-consuming, and rarely essential. His fifth fundamental, “Stop Running Errands,” shows how automation and outsourcing can eliminate these time drains from your life entirely.

Automate Your Routine Tasks

Meisel swears by Amazon Subscribe & Save, a simple yet powerful automation tool. You choose recurring deliveries for essentials like detergent, dog food, or toothpaste, and Amazon ships them automatically at set intervals. He describes never shopping for toilet paper or diapers for three years—because they just arrive on schedule. The result: fewer errands, lower stress, and often a cost saving thanks to subscription discounts.

He also points to Amazon Lockers—secure pickup points for package deliveries—as a fix for apartment dwellers or travelers. Each automated system added removes another source of friction from daily life, proving that with creativity, even mundane tasks can be entirely outsourced to technology.

Outsource the Rest

For tasks that must still be done physically, services like TaskRabbit step in. Think of it as an Uber for errands—hiring vetted helpers to do grocery runs, handle repairs, or even assemble furniture. Meisel shares a charming example: when his nephew in Los Angeles turned two, Meisel tasked a TaskRabbit worker to buy a specific IKEA slide, deliver it, assemble it, and sing happy birthday—all for under fifty dollars. That’s the essence of Less Doing in action: spending money where it saves time and enriches life.

Embrace the 5 Percent Rule

Ultimately, Meisel encourages focusing on the 5 percent of tasks that only you can do—strategic thinking, creativity, personal relationships. The rest should be automated, delegated, or deleted. It’s not about arrogance; it’s about leverage. As business strategist Dan Sullivan famously said, “If you can find someone who can do a task 80 percent as well as you, let them do it.” Meisel extends this beyond business to life itself. If a service can clean your house, manage returns, or send gifts, let it—so you can do what nourishes you.

Freedom isn’t doing everything yourself; it’s designing systems so you no longer have to.

Eliminating errands may feel radical at first, but it’s central to the Less Doing mindset. Each automated subscription, outsourced trip, or delegated task isn’t just a convenience—it’s a deliberate act of buying back your time. And those reclaimed hours? They’re the foundation of more living.

If multitasking is the enemy of deep work, batching is its savior. Ari Meisel’s eighth fundamental, “Batching,” is the art of grouping similar tasks together to build momentum and eliminate context switching—the hidden productivity killer.

Getting in the Zone

When you cluster similar activities—emails, shopping, phone calls—you enter what psychologists call “flow.” Instead of bouncing between unrelated tasks and losing focus, batching lets your brain stay in one cognitive groove. Meisel’s example: he answers all emails during the first ten minutes of every hour, then ignores the inbox until the next cycle. Another: cooking all his family’s meals for the week on Sundays. By investing one solid block of time, he saves hours of decision fatigue and cleanup later.

Digital Decluttering for a Paper-Free Life

Because paper-based chores often fragment attention, Meisel outlines thirteen favorite tools for going paperless: HelloFax for digital faxing, SignNow for contracts, Doxie and CamScanner for cloud-based scanning, and Shoeboxed for digitizing receipts. Together, these turn piles of paper into searchable, cloud-organized data. Suddenly, balancing a budget or submitting taxes becomes a single batched project instead of a constant mental drain.

Avoiding Batching Burnout

Even efficiency has boundaries. Meisel warns against waiting too long to batch—it can backfire. Miss two laundry days in a row, and the simple task becomes an unmanageable mountain. The trick is to set consistent schedules or thresholds: when X items accumulate, process them all at once. With practice, this turns into a rhythm—efficient but sustainable.

Batching shifts you from reactive mode to deliberate mastery of time. Momentum is your greatest efficiency multiplier.

Most people can save five to ten hours a week through batching alone. But perhaps its greatest benefit is psychological: clarity. You no longer live at the mercy of unending trickles of micro-tasks. Instead, you choose when to switch gears, when to rest, and when to create. That’s what “less doing” really means—less fragmentation, more intention.

All the systems in the world mean nothing if your body and mind can’t sustain them. Ari Meisel closes his philosophy with a reminder: wellness is the foundation of productivity. His journey from chronic illness to peak performance taught him that stress, fatigue, and poor nutrition undermine every efficiency effort. True optimization begins within.

Fitness: The 3-Part Formula

Meisel promotes a trio of weekly practices: strength or skill training (like weightlifting or rock climbing), high-intensity interval training (short bursts with rest), and mobility work (yoga or stretching). Each component builds endurance while minimizing time spent. A 30-minute CrossFit or swimming session can replace hours of slow cardio because intensity compounds results. Devices like Fitbit or Basis track progress, aligning wellness with the same data-driven mindset applied to time and money.

Sleep: Quality Over Quantity

Sleep, Meisel argues, is the single biggest productivity enhancer. He explains how poor rest raises ghrelin (hunger hormone) and lowers leptin (satiety), creating a cycle of fatigue and overeating. Solutions include reducing evening blue light exposure and synchronizing sleep cycles in 1.5-hour increments using apps like SleepCycle. Strategic rest, not caffeine, builds real energy reserves for creative work.

Nutrition and Supplements

Forget fad diets. Meisel emphasizes whole, unprocessed foods and good fats—olive oil, avocado, and grass-fed butter—to fuel the brain with ketones instead of sugar crashes. Supplements tie the system together: krill oil for inflammation, probiotics for gut health, and vitamin D for immune and sleep regulation. For deeper insight, he recommends blood analysis via InsideTracker, a service that tailors nutrition and recovery plans to your biomarkers—an application of data-driven living to the human body itself.

Less Doing begins with more being—more presence, balance, and care for the system that powers everything you do.

When you align your diet, sleep, and exercise into a balanced cycle, you don’t just feel good—you gain hours of clean, sustainable energy each week. Meisel’s insight is simple yet profound: you can’t automate your body. Instead, take care of it so everything else—your work, creativity, and happiness—automates itself naturally.