What Leaders and Managers Can Learn from The More of Less
A department head walks out of her fourth back-to-back meeting of the day, calendar already showing three more before lunch, and thinks, the way she has for years, that things will feel manageable once she gets a little more control over her schedule. She has reorganized her calendar software twice this year alone. What she hasn't done is ask what that reclaimed time would actually be spent on — coaching her team, thinking clearly about strategy, simply going home on time. Owning less of anything, including a leader's calendar and inbox, only works as a means toward something specific you've chosen; trim meetings and reports without naming what you want that space for, and the trimming has no direction, so something else quietly refills it within a week. Once the destination is named, it becomes obvious which recurring obligations are actually earning their place on the calendar and which are just inherited habit.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Naming what your leadership time is actually for
Before trimming anything, name specifically what freed time and attention are meant to buy — better one-on-ones, clearer strategic thinking, more presence at home. Without that anchor, any meeting you cancel just gets replaced by another one.
A manager cancels a weekly status meeting to "get some time back," then fills the same slot with email triage within a month, having never decided what the reclaimed hour was actually supposed to protect.
Name one specific outcome you want more time for this quarter, and write it at the top of your calendar view.
How meetings, reports, and approvals compete with that goal
Every recurring meeting, cc'd email chain, and approval layer draws on the same attention your real priorities need, and each one is individually easy to justify while collectively they leave no room for deep work or genuine coaching.
A leadership team keeps a monthly all-hands review that nobody finds useful anymore, because canceling it feels riskier than the hour it costs everyone every month, so it survives on inertia alone, quietly training the next generation of managers that unnecessary meetings are simply how the organization works.
Audit your recurring meetings for one week and mark which ones you would still schedule if you were starting the role today.
Removing the easiest excess first
Start by cutting standing meetings with unclear purposes and reports nobody reads before touching anything tied to a person's role or identity, like a title or a long-standing committee seat. Small, low-conflict cuts build trust before you tackle harder structural changes.
A new leader tries to flatten the entire reporting structure in one announcement, triggers widespread anxiety about job security, and backs off the whole initiative instead of starting with the clearly redundant weekly report.
Eliminate or shorten one recurring meeting this month and tell your team plainly why.
Re-examining as your role and team change
A leaner calendar rarely stays lean on its own. New initiatives, new direct reports, and new stakeholders each bring their own meeting requests and reporting expectations, and last year's essential process can quietly outlive its usefulness once the team or the strategy has moved on. Revisiting your commitments each time your role or team shifts, rather than assuming one cleanup will hold indefinitely, keeps your time aligned with what leadership is actually supposed to accomplish rather than with whatever accumulated while you were focused elsewhere.
Naming what you want more time for and actually removing obligations can conflict when cutting a meeting means a direct report loses visibility they value. Resolve it by replacing the meeting's real function — feedback, recognition, connection — through a shorter or different channel, rather than assuming removing the meeting automatically means removing the underlying need it was quietly serving all along.
Name one thing, honestly
Which recurring commitment on your calendar right now would you still choose to keep if you had to justify it completely from scratch today?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Eliminate or shorten one recurring meeting this month and tell your team plainly why.