Spuds Oxley: Rome, 1986. A man named Carlo Petrini is standing outside a newly opened McDonald's near the Piazza di Spagna … and he is not happy.
Spuds Oxley: The easy read is that this is about hamburgers. But Petrini wasn't really protesting the food — he was protesting the pace. The assumption baked into the whole enterprise, that faster eating was progress, that speed was a virtue you didn't need to justify.
Spuds Oxley: That moment sparked the Slow Food movement. Which eventually became something much wider — a whole cultural argument about what we owe our own attention.
Spuds Oxley: I think about that protest a lot. More than is probably reasonable.
Spuds Oxley: Because what Petrini was naming — even if he didn't frame it this way — was something Herbert Simon had been trying to get economists to take seriously for years. Simon, the Nobel laureate, working at the intersection of economics and cognitive science, kept insisting that attention is scarce. That it's a resource with a ceiling. And that adding tasks doesn't distribute effort evenly across them — it dilutes ALL of them.
Spuds Oxley: Kahneman would later give that idea its full architecture. Slow thought is costly. It draws from a limited pool. And when that pool empties, you don't just get tired — you get worse. At everything.
Spuds Oxley: Which brings me back to a calendar I was staring at recently — mine, as it happens — every hour blocked, every color assigned, and this small glow of satisfaction at how full it looked.
Spuds Oxley: That glow is the tell.
Spuds Oxley: Busyness, somewhere between Petrini's protest and now, became a social signal. A status marker. The fuller your days look, the more essential you must be. And the disturbing thing — the thing worth actually sitting with — is that the signal operates completely independently of whether any of it produces something that matters.
Spuds Oxley: You can be fully scheduled and entirely unproductive. The calendar doesn't know the difference.
Spuds Oxley: Now, the Slow Movement — and I want to be precise about this, because people soften it into a lifestyle aesthetic — it was never about candles and linen. What Petrini was building, what Carl Honoré spent years articulating in In Praise of Slow back in 2004, was an argument with actual stakes. That the pace we'd accepted as normal was costing us something real. Not comfort. Capacity.
Spuds Oxley: Honoré's book went global. Which tells you something — not that people wanted permission to slow down, but that they'd been waiting for someone to name what was already wrong.
Spuds Oxley: And then, years later, on the other side of this entirely — the productivity world, the business world — Greg McKeown comes along and formalizes the same intuition in a completely different language. Essentialism. The disciplined pursuit of less. Not less because it's pleasant, but less because the math demands it. Identify the vital few things that actually matter. Eliminate the trivial many. Ruthlessly, is the word he uses. And he means it.
Spuds Oxley: Two traditions. Decades apart. Different vocabularies entirely. Landing in the same place.
Spuds Oxley: That convergence is worth paying attention to. Because it's not a coincidence — it's the same underlying fact surfacing through different fields. The cognitive math is against us when we pile on. Simon said attention has a ceiling. Kahneman showed what happens when you spend past it. The principle of diminishing returns — which economists treat as almost boringly obvious — tells us that beyond a certain threshold, more effort doesn't just help less … it actively makes things worse.
Spuds Oxley: Worse. Not flat. Negative.
Spuds Oxley: And here's what I've come to think — not as a philosophy, just as a fact I can't unfind. Doing less isn't a lifestyle hack. It isn't a productivity trick you adopt when you finally feel successful enough to afford it. It is a cognitive necessity. The culture just punishes it. That's the trap. We've built systems — social, professional, organizational — that reward the appearance of maximum effort and penalize the kind of strategic subtraction that would actually produce better results.
Spuds Oxley: You feel that, I think. The subtle cost of saying no to something. The small performance required to justify a cleared afternoon.
Spuds Oxley: Honestly, Petrini standing outside that McDonald's in 1986 and McKeown writing about essentialism thirty years later were both pointing at the same trap from opposite ends. One from culture, one from strategy. The trap being — we've confused the volume of activity with the value of it. And that confusion, once it gets into a calendar, into a career, into the way an organization measures people — it is very hard to correct. Not because the evidence isn't there. Because the signal is pointing the wrong way.
Spuds Oxley: Here's where the mechanism actually lives — not in philosophy, not in culture, but in the brain itself.
Spuds Oxley: The American Psychological Association documented it with a number that still stops me cold. Every time you shift context — pull your attention from one task and redirect it to another — you lose up to forty percent of your productive output. Forty. Not because you're distracted in some soft, general sense. Because the brain has to pay a switching cost each time it refocuses. Cognitive overhead. Real, measurable, unavoidable.
Spuds Oxley: And that cost compounds.
Spuds Oxley: So the calendar full of color-coded blocks isn't just aesthetically wrong — it is arithmetically wrong. Every context switch is a tax. Paid every single time.
Spuds Oxley: Which is what makes Ericsson's work so striking when you come to it from that direction.
Spuds Oxley: K. Anders Ericsson, working at Florida State University, spent years studying elite performers — violinists, chess players, athletes — and the question he was asking was simple enough: what separates the best from the merely very good? And the answer was not more hours. The top violinists were not logging more total practice time than their peers. They were logging less. But the sessions they did commit to were highly focused, deliberately aimed at specific weaknesses, and followed by genuine rest. That's the framework he called deliberate practice. Not grind. Precision, then recovery.
Spuds Oxley: Rest wasn't a reward. It was part of the work.
Spuds Oxley: Sit with that for a moment, because it runs completely against the intuition most of us were handed. We were told that more practice, more hours, more effort — that was the path. Ericsson's data said the path was fewer, sharper sessions. The elite performers had subtracted their way to the top.
Spuds Oxley: Which brings in Leidy Klotz, and this is — look, this is the piece I find most uncomfortable.
Spuds Oxley: Klotz's research, covered in Behavioral Scientist, identified what he called subtraction bias. Humans have a systematic cognitive default to ADD when improving something. More rules, more steps, more features. Even when removing would be more effective. It's not stupidity. It's not laziness. It's a default we did not choose — wired in, operating below the level of deliberate reasoning. We reach for addition the way you reach for a light switch in the dark. Automatically.
Spuds Oxley: We were never set up to subtract.
Spuds Oxley: And that explains — at least partly — why the evidence doesn't fix the behavior. The evidence has been there. Kahneman mapped the finite pool. Simon named the ceiling. The APA ran the numbers on task-switching. Ericsson showed what elite focus actually looks like. And still, we add. Still, we fill the calendar. Because the pull toward addition is older than any of those findings, and it doesn't yield to a paper.
Spuds Oxley: There's a small example I keep returning to — small but surprisingly precise. Research in legal writing education found that covering fewer skills more deeply produced better learning transfer than broad, shallow coverage. Fewer skills. Better outcomes. The same logic Ericsson found in the violin studio, showing up in a law classroom. The principle doesn't care what field it's in.
Spuds Oxley: Depth travels. Breadth dilutes.
Spuds Oxley: Now — and I want to be fair to the counterargument here, because it matters — not everyone has the structural luxury of subtracting. The deliberate practice model, the essentialism framework McKeown builds, Klotz's subtraction insight — they assume a degree of agency over your own hours that not every person actually has. Economic pressure, organizational structure, the simple fact that some people cannot afford to say no to a task — that's real. The cognitive math may be universal. The freedom to act on it is not.
Spuds Oxley: But knowing the mechanism — knowing the switch cost, knowing the subtraction bias, knowing what Ericsson found in those practice logs — at least you're not fighting the wrong battle in the dark.
Spuds Oxley: Spuds Oxley: But I want to say this plainly, because I think it's the most honest objection to everything I've just laid out. The cognitive math may be universal. The freedom to act on it is not.
Spuds Oxley: When work-life balance research talks about systemic organizational pressures — it's not describing a scheduling inconvenience. It's describing a structure where the cost of saying no falls entirely on the person with the least leverage to absorb it. The deliberate practice model, the essentialism framework, the subtraction insight Klotz describes — they all assume you hold the pen over your own calendar. A lot of people don't.
Spuds Oxley: That nags at me. Genuinely.
Spuds Oxley: Because there's a version of this argument — do less, go deeper, protect your attention — that lands very differently depending on whether you have economic security or a skill set rare enough that the market will tolerate your boundaries. McKeown's essentialism is a beautifully reasoned framework. It is also, if I'm honest, written for someone who already has enough standing to push back. Not everyone is in that room.
Spuds Oxley: And I don't think naming that fact dissolves the argument. But it does limit it.
Spuds Oxley: Then there's the persistence question — and this one is harder for me to answer cleanly. If the evidence is that clear, if Simon and Kahneman and Ericsson are all pointing in the same direction, why hasn't the culture actually shifted? Why does hustle still win the signal game?
Spuds Oxley: One possibility is a selection effect. That hustle culture persists not because it works universally — but because the people who genuinely thrive under overload are visible, and the people it grinds down quietly leave or fail quietly. You see the survivors. You build a culture around what the survivors did. That's not evidence. That's survivorship.
Spuds Oxley: But — and I sit with this — I can't fully rule out that some people actually do produce better under conditions that would flatten most of us. Domain might matter more than I've allowed. Ericsson's deliberate practice findings have been contested on exactly this ground — the question of whether focused quality time always outperforms sheer quantity, or whether certain fields, certain kinds of work, reward a different ratio entirely. That's a live debate. I don't want to close it prematurely.
Spuds Oxley: And then there's the quiet quitting ambiguity. Which I find genuinely uncomfortable.
Spuds Oxley: Because on one reading, pulling back — doing your job, not more — is exactly the intentional subtraction this whole argument recommends. On another reading, it's disengagement dressed up in the language of essentialism. The line between those two things is not always clear. Critics of quiet quitting aren't wrong that it can represent real harm to the people around you, to the organizations that depend on shared effort. That's not a strawman. That's a genuine complication.
Spuds Oxley: Intentional subtraction requires you to know what the vital thing actually is. Disengagement doesn't ask that question at all.
Spuds Oxley: So I'm left holding both. The cognitive case is real — the switch costs, the finite pool, what Ericsson found in those practice logs. I believe the evidence. And I also think the prescription attached to it carries assumptions about freedom and agency that the evidence itself cannot supply. That's where I actually am. Not resolved. Just more clearly lost than I was before.
Spuds Oxley: What I keep snagging on — and I haven't resolved this, not cleanly — is that Klotz's subtraction bias isn't just a cognitive quirk you can correct once you've been told about it. That's not how it works. You know about it now. I know about it. And tomorrow morning, when something needs fixing, the hand still reaches for addition. More steps. More coverage. One more item on the agenda. The knowledge doesn't override the wiring.
Spuds Oxley: So asking 'what should we remove?' — actually stopping and asking that, in a room full of people adding — that's not just a different question. It is a countercultural act. A small one. Quiet, even. But it runs against something deep enough that it costs something to do it.
Spuds Oxley: And that's where I get stuck on the privilege question again. Because the person who can stand in that room and ask 'why are we doing this at all?' — rather than 'how do we do more of it?' — that person needs enough standing to absorb the silence that follows. The slight discomfort. The possibility of being read as the one who isn't pulling. Not everyone can pay that cost. Some people cannot afford to be the one who removes a thing.
Spuds Oxley: I don't know whether asking the subtraction question is courage or whether it's just something easier to call courage when you have enough security to try it. Maybe both. Maybe the line between them is thinner than the framework allows. That's where I actually am with it — holding that, not quite sure which side I'd fall on in a given room, on a given day.
