Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Busy Moms

by Kate Northrup

She taught about the wisdom of the feminine to protect, nourish, and take care of our bodies, but she didn’t live within a culture that allowed that to happen for her, and she certainly didn’t choose a career that made that possible.

We’re starting to understand that we need our intuitive, generous, and nurturing sides in order to thrive as a species. We are beginning to understand that life is not always linear, that there’s beauty and value in the unknown, and that there’s more to life than what we have to show for a day’s work.

we must question our beliefs that work is separate from “life” and that the only way to be valuable is to do more and more.

We cannot simultaneously demand more freedom and flexibility while priding ourselves on never taking a vacation day and answering e-mails at 3 a.m. to prove our value.

We expect ourselves to be in a perpetual late summer/early autumn. We ask for the harvest year-round. Our bodies ask us to take a break, and we feel guilty. We beat ourselves up for rest. We feel terrified to tell our families and communities when we don’t know what’s next in our careers or our lives because God forbid we fall off the linear path of success and take a detour into the fertile void of “I don’t know.” We boldly opt out of the system to create one that works for us, and then we work ourselves to the bone, following the model that we wanted to escape in the first place.

She was speaking so loud to me as she grew our child that I couldn’t ignore her and push through.

I found that as I honored my body and the season she was in, nothing fell apart.

What I’m proposing is that if we work in sync with the cycles going on within us

and around us, we’ll find that we can do less, yet net more. And that we can feel more satisfaction, ease, and harmony as we do it.

It’s no longer acceptable to work as though we don’t have bodies, as though we are not of nature.