The Case for Essentialism in 2025 (on Substack and in Life)
How doing fewer things can make you happier and accomplish more
I have a confession to make. It’s not an unusual or surprising confession, I suspect, to most of you, particularly at this time of year.
I am feeling overwhelmed.
I am trying to focus on too many things at once, and my mind and my body are having visceral reactions to these attempts. I am having trouble prioritizing what’s important and what’s not. I am not wanting to write or turn to my to-do list because I’m not even sure where to start, and when I do, I am not writing well. I have too many goals, too many distractions.
In short, I want to do all the things. Substack is part of this overwhelm for me, but it’s not all of it.
You see, I know myself. When I try to do a bunch of things, I end up not doing any of them well. That’s true on Substack, and it’s true in life. And I’m not alone. Our brains are wired this way. They are not built for multi-tasking many things that we consider important all at the same time.
It all comes down to one paradox for me: I want to do a lot of things, and I want to do them all very well. But I know that’s just not possible, or at least not possible without costs — for my mental health, for the quality of the work that I do, for sticking to my long-term values and priorities.
I find myself taking out a book that I turn to again and again when I find myself at moments like this — Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown.
In many ways it’s not really my type of book at all. I don’t ordinarily find myself pulled to titles in the leadership/business/personal development genre. And a lot of the book describes examples that are way too corporate or business-speak for my tastes.
And yet I strive to be an essentialist, in the way that McKeown describes this approach to life and projects.
In at its heart, essentialism involves a few steps:
Identify what it truly essential (to a project, to your professional life, to life in general)
Say no to everything that is not essential
Design your life around what’s essential to you
It’s about doing less, but better.
Making trade-offs, saying no to most things in order to do a few things well that matter most. Focusing on deep work, rather than superficial distractions. Finding clarity of purpose. Giving yourself permission to stop trying to do it all.
From the book:
“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.” — Greg McKeown
So how does essentialism relate to our writing lives and to Substack?
For me, I want to step back and think about making goals for the New Year differently. Instead of listing a bunch of unrelated goals or making one huge New Year’s resolution, I want to ask myself two questions (and I don’t have the answers yet):
What are the two or three things I want to say “yes” to?
What are the many more things that I want to say “no” to in order to say “yes” to those main priorities?
Maybe, for you, if Substack will be a new priority for you in the New Year, that means thinking about setting aside things that are not contributing to your main goals, asking “what will I give up to make space for this new priority?”
And being an essentialist on Substack means prioritizing just a few things at a time to work on. It means giving yourself permission not to spend your mental energy on everything on Substack all at once. It means saying “no” to most opportunities or Substack features and saying “yes” to just a few. Focus on one or two Substack features or possibilities at a time, do them well, and then reprioritize.
I don’t know what that will look like for me yet. For example, I want to figure out if Notes will be a priority or not.
Thank you for this timely article, which validates what I've been going through. November-December are the hardest months for me personally, but this year it's been much worse than others. I recently decided to scale down my own self-imposed schedule and expectations of my Substack and declared that it's going to be a "blog" instead. That freed up my mental energy and angst of always chasing for that elusive "growth" and "traction." By turning away from the business metrics, I feel a lot freer and that may help me live and write in more inspired ways. I love the two questions you asked and will ponder over them this month.
I made Substack one of my priorities, but I feel I have taken on too much! I read every newsletter I subscribe to, try to be a good citizen, comment on essays, and also write my own newsletter. It is a lot, and then I find myself missing other things, trying to do them, and feeling stretched too thin.