Stop Averaging Down
The math behind why doing less is the only real path to doing more.
Hey.
Today I wanted to start with a puzzle. Stick with me. It will break something in your brain that needed to be broken.
You get in your car. Your destination is 60 miles away. Traffic is brutal for the first half. After 30 miles, you’ve averaged only 30 mph.
Then the road opens up. Empty lanes. No cops. No speed limit.
How fast do you have to drive during the second half to average 60 mph for the entire trip?
Take a guess. 90 mph? 120? 200?
The answer: it’s mathematically impossible.
To average 60 mph over 60 miles, you’d need to complete the entire distance in one hour. But you’ve already spent that hour crawling through traffic for the first 30 miles. Even if you teleported the remaining distance, you’d still fall short.
Even doubling your speed in the second half only lifts your trip average from 30 to 40 mph. Quadrupling it? Still only 48.
Let that sink in.
Periods of low velocity don’t just slow you down. They mathematically destroy any gains from high velocity. Irreversibly.
This is not a driving lesson.
This is the most honest thing I’ve read about productivity in years. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It rewires how you think about your work, your business, and possibly your entire life.
The 1% Lie Everyone Believes
You’ve seen the meme. Probably this week.
“Get 1% better every day and you’ll be 37x better in a year.”
It gets shared on LinkedIn like scripture. CEOs quote it in town halls. Motivational accounts slap it on sunset photos. Entire coaching businesses are built on it.
The math checks out. 1.01^365 = 37.78.
But here’s what’s broken: the premise.
It assumes your entire day operates at peak velocity. That every hour compounds on the one before it. That there’s no friction. No resistance. No gravity.
No email rabbit holes at 9:17 AM.
No “quick sync” that devours 45 minutes.
No Slack threads about Slack threads about the meeting about the Slack thread.
No twenty minutes spent trying to remember what you were doing before the last interruption knocked you off course.
The reality? Half your day moves at 30 mph. The low-velocity hours swallow the high-velocity ones whole.
You’re not compounding. You’re not even maintaining.
You’re averaging down.
It’s like inflation eating your savings. You feel busy. You feel productive. But the returns keep shrinking.
The Speed Trap No One Talks About
Here’s what the entire productivity industry overlooks.
Almost every piece of advice focuses on acceleration. Work faster. Wake earlier. Install another app. Batch your calls. Optimize your calendar. Hire an assistant. Use AI to write your emails. Learn to type faster. Meditate to focus better. Take nootropics.
All of it addresses the fast half of the equation.
But the slow half is the one that’s killing you.
Think of it like a stock portfolio. If seven of your ten investments are bleeding money, it doesn’t matter how brilliantly the other three perform. The losers drag down your overall return, and no amount of winner picking compensates.
Your hours work the same way.
One study found the average knowledge worker checks email every 11 minutes. After each check, it takes about 25 minutes to fully re-engage with the original task. Do the math on that and you realize something disturbing:
Most people never actually work a full, uninterrupted hour. Not once. In the entire day.
They think they work eight hours. In reality, they work in fragments of 11 minutes, scattered across a sea of interruptions, context switches, and digital noise. The actual deep work? Maybe 90 minutes total. On a good day.
But here’s the part nobody says out loud:
The low-velocity activities aren’t just unproductive. They’re actively destroying the productive ones. Every interruption doesn’t just steal the minute it takes. It steals the 25 minutes of recovery that follow. Every “quick” email check doesn’t just cost you the email. It costs you the state of flow you were building toward.
The slow stuff is a black hole. And it’s pulling everything in.
The Subtraction Principle
So what’s the actual solution?
It’s not working harder. It’s not another tool. It’s not waking up at 4:47 AM or color-coding your Notion dashboard.
It’s removal.
When you stop trying to sell people who aren’t a good fit, you create space for 3x more pitches, each with 3x the close rate.
When you stop trying to shore up every weakness, you create space to weaponize your strengths.
When you stop chasing every metric, you create space to attack the one metric that will actually transform your business.
When you stop trying to improve everything by 1%, you create space to improve the biggest thing by 30%.
Read that list again. Notice the pattern.
Every single line starts with “When you stop.”
Not “when you add.” Not “when you optimize.” Not “when you scale.”
When you stop.
There’s a concept in philosophy called via negativa. The path of negation. The idea that you define truth not by adding what something is, but by removing what it isn’t. Michelangelo didn’t build David. He removed everything that wasn’t David.
Your best work lives inside a block of marble right now. It’s buried under meetings, half-commitments, mediocre projects, “sure, I’ll take a look” promises, and the gravitational pull of other people’s priorities.
You don’t need to create more. You need to chisel away.
The Graveyard of “Fine”
Here’s the part that makes this emotionally difficult, the part everyone skips.
The things you need to remove aren’t bad. They’re fine.
They’re the projects that are “showing some traction.” The partnerships that are “pretty good.” The revenue streams that are “decent.” The habits that “mostly work.”
Cutting bad things is easy. Cutting fine things is agonizing.
I wrote about this dynamic in my Mediocre Success Is Worse Than Failure piece, which was actually the first thing I ever published on this newsletter. And I keep coming back to it because the insight only gets sharper with time:
“There’s something uniquely soul-crushing about being just successful enough to keep going, but not successful enough to matter.”
Total failure? That teaches you things. Forces pivots. Demands reinvention. You crash, you learn, you rebuild.
But mediocre success across ten simultaneous projects? That’s a prison with an open door you never walk through. Because each individual thing seems worth keeping. It’s only the aggregate that’s slowly strangling you.
Mediocre success across ten projects is just sophisticated procrastination.
And I should know. I’ve been the poster child.
What I Had to Kill
Running Belkins, Folderly, and Equinox simultaneously, I was the classic “spread thin” founder. Each company was growing. None was growing fast enough. Every week felt like I was switching gears 200 times and never hitting top speed.
My instinct? Go faster. More meetings. More strategy sessions. More “alignment calls.” More everything.
I described this exact trap in my Plateau edition. I called it the Fatigue Economy. Where exhaustion becomes the organization’s primary currency. Where everyone is conserving energy for a battle that never comes. Where the founder wakes at 4 AM, not with new ideas, but with their absence.
Oxygen runs out long before the runway does.
The breakthrough didn’t come from acceleration.
It came from a question that felt almost physically painful to ask:
“What would happen if I just... didn’t do half of what I’m doing?”
Not delegated it. Not optimized it. Not batched it into a more efficient block.
Eliminated it.
And the answer, once I forced myself to be honest, was: most of it wouldn’t matter. The world wouldn’t end. Revenue wouldn’t collapse. Nobody would even notice.
What happened instead surprised me. The things I kept? They got dramatically, almost embarrassingly better. Not because I learned some new skill. Not because I found some magic tool. But because I finally had the cognitive space, the creative energy, the uninterrupted hours to actually go deep.
I wasn’t driving faster. I was removing the traffic.
The Mountain vs. The Map
Sylvia Plath wrote something in The Bell Jar that should be printed on every founder’s office wall:
“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
That’s not a novel excerpt. That’s a Tuesday afternoon for every founder I know.
Slack notifications are figs. Partnership opportunities are figs. “Could be interesting” projects are figs. And while you’re paralyzed by optionality, they’re all rotting.
Not choosing is a choice. It’s the choice to lose everything.
Derek Sivers offers the antidote. Imagine your destination is a huge mountain peak on the horizon. You can see it from everywhere. Yes to that mountain. No to everything else. All paths either go toward it or away from it.
With your eyes on the peak, problems don’t deter you. You step over obstacles. You don’t stop to examine every rock or debate which trail is prettiest. You just walk toward the mountain.
“Decisions are easy when you have only one priority.”
Notice: he doesn’t say “when you have three priorities” or “when you have a balanced portfolio of priorities.” One. Priority.
Everything else is scenery.
The Overlooked Truth About the AI Era
Here’s the angle nobody is connecting yet.
We’re living through the most powerful amplification of human capability in history. AI can generate a thousand ideas before your coffee gets cold. It can write drafts, build prototypes, research markets, compose music, analyze data.
The era of idea people has arrived. Creation is essentially free now.
But here’s what that actually means, and almost everyone misses this:
When the cost of “doing” approaches zero, the value of “not doing” approaches infinity.
Think about it. If AI lets you pursue 50 projects simultaneously, the person who still chooses to pursue only 3 has an almost unfair advantage. Because those 3 get all their cognitive bandwidth. All their creative energy. All their decision-making capacity.
My music production experiments taught me this viscerally. I used AI to generate thousands of vocal stems. The success rate was 0.2%. Out of a thousand attempts, two were usable. The skill wasn’t generation. It was selection. Knowing which two out of a thousand were worth keeping.
The same logic applies to your entire life right now.
The skill of this decade isn’t productivity. It’s elimination.
In a world of infinite options, the competitive advantage belongs to whoever is most willing to say no. To kill their darlings. To close doors that are “pretty interesting” so they can walk all the way through the one that matters.
The winners of the AI era won’t be the busiest.
They’ll be the most focused.
The Velocity Audit
If any of this resonates, here’s what I’d actually do. Starting tomorrow morning. Not next quarter. Not “when things calm down.” Tomorrow.
1. Track your real velocity for one week.
Write down what you do in 30-minute blocks. Not what your calendar says you’re doing. What you actually do. Include the 20 minutes you spent “just quickly checking” something. Include the meeting you sat in silently. Include the context-switching tax.
You’ll be horrified. That’s the point. You can’t fix what you refuse to see.
2. Identify your 30 mph hours.
Look at the log. Find the patterns. Where are you consistently operating at low velocity? Email binges? Unnecessary meetings? Bouncing between too many projects? “Research” that’s really just sophisticated scrolling?
Be honest. Nobody else is going to see this. Lie to yourself and you stay in traffic forever.
3. Eliminate. Don’t optimize.
This is the hard part. Don’t try to make the 30 mph hours go 35 mph. That’s rearranging deck chairs. Kill them.
Unsubscribe. Decline. Block the time. Cancel the recurring meeting that nobody would miss. If something has been producing mediocre results for three months, it won’t magically start working in month four. Let it die.
4. Protect the open road.
Once you’ve cleared the traffic, guard those hours with your life. Your best 2-3 hours of deep work per day are more valuable than the other 6 combined. They deserve fortress walls, not open doors.
5. Name your mountain.
Write it down. One sentence. The one thing that, if everything else failed but this succeeded, would make the year worthwhile. Put it where you see it every morning before you see anything else.
If you can’t write that sentence, that’s your real problem. Not productivity. Clarity.
The One Equation
I want to leave you with the simplest version of all of this.
The productivity equation isn’t:
Output = Hours x Intensity
It’s:
Output = High-velocity hours minus drag from low-velocity hours
You cannot outrun drag. You cannot hustle your way past friction. You cannot wake up early enough to compensate for a day that’s 70% traffic.
The only move is to remove the traffic.
Stop averaging down.
Name the mountain.
Drive.
🎬 Post-Credit Scene
Some things I’ve been consuming that echo today’s themes and wanted to share with you most important I’ve found:
📖 Slow Productivity by Cal Newport (2024). Three principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality. Newport studied how Jane Austen wrote five novels in four years, not by grinding, but by stepping back from social obligations until she had clear space. When her life was too busy, she couldn’t write at all. Sound familiar? This is the full operating manual for everything in today’s newsletter.
📖 Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The average human lifespan is roughly 4,000 weeks. Burkeman’s core argument: the more you try to master time, the more anxious and less productive you become. The real move is accepting you can’t do everything and choosing wisely what actually gets your finite weeks. He calls it “the paradox of limitation,” that life gets more productive, more meaningful, and more joyful when you stop fighting your constraints and start working with them. Deeply philosophical. Deeply practical.
🎧 Deep Questions Ep. 389: Is the Internet Hijacking Ambition? by Cal Newport (Jan 26, 2026). Newport’s latest explores how online exposure to extreme success stories is warping our sense of what ambition should look like, pushing people toward scattered “hustle” instead of focused craft. The practice segment on escaping messaging hell is pure gold for anyone drowning in Slack and email. The most relevant Deep Questions episode for today’s theme.
🎧 Tactics and Strategies for a 2026 Reboot with Greg McKeown on The Tim Ferriss Show (Jan 2026). Ferriss and McKeown dig into how to apply the Essentialism framework specifically for this year. McKeown’s “Power of Half an Hour” concept, dedicating just 30 focused minutes to your most essential task before anything else, is the simplest move you can make this week. They also discuss the Essentialism Planner as a 90-day guide to accomplishing more by doing less. If you need a hard reset, start here.
🎧 The Productivity Myth, Oliver Burkeman on Rich Roll Podcast (Nov 2025). Burkeman dismantles the idea that productivity is a moral imperative, diagnoses the host’s people-pleasing tendencies live on air, and explains why acceptance isn’t resignation. Rich Roll called it life-changing, and for once, that’s not hyperbole. Two hours of philosophy that hits like therapy.
🔗 Creating Space by Jason Cohen (Jan 2026). The essay that sparked half of today’s newsletter. A beautifully simple list of what becomes possible when you subtract the wrong things from your life and business. No fluff. No frameworks. Just truth, compressed into the shortest, sharpest piece on focus I’ve read this year. Bookmark it. Read it on the first of every month. It’s a reset button for your brain.
Thanks for reading.
Vlad