The law of diminishing returns is running the lives of some of the most talented, committed, hardest-working people I know.
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There is an economic principle that most leaders learned in school and then promptly forgot to apply to themselves. It is called the law of diminishing returns, and it is running (did your mind also trip up there and see ‘ruining’?) the lives of some of the most talented, generous, and ambitious people I know.
The principle works like this. Imagine a farmer who decides she needs more revenue. She leases the plot next door, which seems like a reasonable move. But if she doesn’t hire more people to work it, buy more seeds, or invest in the infrastructure to support expanded production, that new land produces nothing. She hasn’t grown her farm. She has simply spread herself thinner across more of it.
This is not a story about sustainable agriculture. It is an urgent alert for every high-performing leader who responds to a slipping result, a new role, or a stretch goal by doing more of what got them here. More meetings. More visibility. More hours. Even more mindfulness.
The instinct is understandable, and even rational, given the robust infrastructure enticing and rewarding us for doing more. We are trained, from early on, to equate addition with progress. Gold stars go to the people who do more, take on more, show up more. Women and other under-recognized people are particularly likely to over-effort in an attempt to earn equal recognition and compensation.
The law of diminishing returns doesn’t care about any of that. It simply observes that investment in a single dimension, no matter how worthy, eventually flattens out. And then the costs of ineffective effort start to pile up.
The Myth Leaders Tell Themselves
The most common pushback I hear when I introduce the idea of Systematic Subtraction™️ is some version of: there is so much going on, there is no way I can do less. I take that objection seriously, because it is not wrong. There is a lot going on. The pace is relentless, the stakes are real, and the demands are not imaginary.
But notice what the objection assumes: that adding is the only available move. That more input reliably produces more output. That the farmer’s best option is always to lease more land.
The research does not support this. What high-performing organizations, and people, share is not a higher volume of activity. It is a tighter alignment between the activities they choose to do and the outcomes those activities are designed to produce. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. The smoothness comes from alignment.
Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant found in his research that givers (those most oriented toward helping others) are overrepresented at both the top and the bottom of performance outcomes, with the difference coming down to one variable: whether they protect their own resources while giving, or deplete them.
Stop: A Data Collection Exercise, Not A Retreat
The first step of what I teach as Systematic Subtraction is called Stop, and it is almost always misunderstood. It is not a meditation retreat, sabbatical, or a digital detox. It is an eyes-wide-open pause, whether ten seconds before joining a call or ten minutes at the start of a week, designed to gather data about how things are actually going.
The question I invite leaders to ask is deceptively simple: How is it really going? Not how do I hope it’s going. Not how does it look on the performance review or revenue tracker. How are things actually going: in your body, your relationships, your results, your energy?
The data is always already there. A stomach ache that appears before a specific recurring meeting. Engagement and enthusiasm from a client that has gradually but undeniably fallen away. A review cycle that didn’t go as expected.
We are not lacking information. We are lacking the habit of stopping long enough to read it, and the critical belief that what we find there is worth acting on.
Drop: The Experiment, Not The Embargo
Once you have the data, the next step is to experiment with letting go of something. I want to emphasize the word experiment, because this is where most people either overshoot (blowing up their calendar in a dramatic burst of resolution) or undershoot (changing nothing because the stakes feel too high, or inertia simply wins).
A drop is a hypothesis. Consider a recurring meeting that your data suggests isn’t producing much. Before you cancel it permanently, consider: what actually happens if you skip it once? Does anything break? Does anyone notice? Or do you find yourself with forty-five minutes to do focused work, and discover that the AI-generated notes captured everything you needed?
Of course, you might find the opposite. You might realize that the two or three minutes of informal conversation before the agenda is called to order are where you do some of your best relationship-building with a colleague whose team you eventually want to work with. The forty-five minutes felt useless; the pre-meeting did not. That is important data. Keep the meeting and participate in a way that honors its true purpose for you.
Roll: Where The Real Return Appears
Roll is where subtraction stops being about doing less and starts being about doing better. It is also where most frameworks for simplification stop short, which is why so many well-intentioned efforts to clear the plate eventually refill it.
In Roll, the practice is to connect the dots: notice what happened when you let something go, and trace those ripples deliberately. When the logistics manager turns his team’s one-on-ones into walk-and-talks, he isn’t just recovering meeting time. He is modeling active leadership, adding movement to his day, giving his team a different kind of conversational context, and signaling – without yet another unread memo – that he values both efficiency and wellbeing.
One subtraction. Multiple returns.
This is the reframe that changes everything for high achievers: the goal of subtraction is not to do less. It is to let your activities do more. The neurological reality is that true multitasking does not exist. The brain switches between tasks, and each switch carries a cost of two to seven minutes of recovery time.
But when your activities are genuinely aligned – when a single meeting serves your growth, your relationships, and your team’s development simultaneously – the work itself compounds. You are not multitasking. Your efforts are.
The Harder Question
The law of diminishing returns does not punish effort. It punishes undiversified effort: the assumption that more of the same will keep producing more of the same. At some point, every farmer has to stop leasing land and start investing differently.
The leaders I most respect have learned, usually after at least one expensive lesson, that the question worth sitting with is not what else can I add? It is what am I still doing that has stopped producing a return?
The answer, when you stop long enough to see it, is almost always simpler than the problem it’s been creating.