The Parsimony Project

How I am going to Redesign one part of my Life each Month

In this post I’m going to outline my approach. First, I’ll provide a positionality statement to give some necessary context. Then I’ll explain how I plan to look at my life as a system and redesign it in a systematic-ish, iterative way.

Positionality

I am approaching this project as a cisgender White woman who is a registered nurse and tenured professor at a comprehensive university in Eastern Canada. I grew up in a lower-middle-class home in a small town in Nova Scotia. My first job was a paper route when I was 10, and I have worked many different jobs since, including as a lifeguard, personal trainer, babysitter, personal support worker, resident assistant, tutor, and lots more. I am the first person in my family to earn a PhD and become a professor.

I am also a mom of three wonderful kids and have spent the majority of my time as a parent without a partner. I have thought a lot about household management and operations, division of labour in caregiving and at home, and, more recently, about coordination and dealing with increasingly complex family logistics.

My “go-to” theory when it comes to understanding work is the Job Demands-Resources model. Very simply, the model looks at the demands people face in their work and the resources they have available to help them manage those demands. I naturally find myself thinking about this outside of work too, because people have a whole life. Work and non-work do not happen in isolation. We have one life, with a finite amount of time, energy, attention, money, space, and other resources, and demands in one area inevitably affect the others.

That is really the starting point for this project.

Looking at my life as a system

I have tried lots of approaches to productivity, organization, minimalism, planning, and household management over the years. Some have been helpful and others, not so much. I really wanted to love Getting Things Done, for example, but I have increasingly realized that I am less interested in becoming better at managing everything than I am in questioning why there is so much to manage in the first place.

I don’t want a better system for efficiently doing unnecessary work – I want to understand where the work is coming from.

So, rather than starting with a list of habits or rules, I want to start by looking at my life as a set of interconnected systems. Home. Clothing and stuff. Food. Health and fitness. Money. Work. Family logistics. Play. Technology. Relationships. The categories may change as I go, but the basic idea is that each area of life has its own tasks, routines, objects, people, decisions, technologies, handoffs, and expectations.

Each of those systems also creates demands. Some are obvious, like money or physical effort spent. Others are less visible: remembering, noticing, planning, deciding, coordinating, searching, following up, keeping track, and switching attention from one thing to another (the mental load).

And, of course, these systems are not separate. What happens in one affects the others.

Mapping before fixing

My first step each month will be to map the area I am looking at before I try to improve it. I want to understand things like:

What actually has to happen?

Who is involved?

What needs to be remembered, decided, bought, stored, maintained, moved, scheduled, or replaced?

Where are the points of friction?

Where am I duplicating effort?

What depends on me noticing something?

What falls apart when I am tired, busy, distracted, or simply having a very normal week?

What resources are already helping?

And, importantly, what is the system actually supposed to accomplish?

That last question matters because the goal is not to make everything as efficient as possible.

Some things are absolutely worth the time, money, effort, or mess they create. Playing with my kids is not inefficient because it takes time. Cooking something I enjoy is not wasteful because there is a faster option. Reading a book does not need to be optimized.

The question is whether the demands are helping produce something I actually value.

Redesigning

Once I understand the system a little better, I’ll look for opportunities to change it. If I were designing this system from scratch today, would I design it this way? If not, how might it be different and better?

I am deliberately not creating a rigid framework for this yet because I don’t know what I am going to learn. Part of the point of the project is to figure out which principles actually hold up across different areas of life.

My current process is something like:

Map → Question → Redesign → Test → Reflect

That is probably as formal as I want it to be for now.

What I am not trying to do

This is not a project about squeezing more productivity out of every hour. It is not about owning the fewest possible things (as a busy working mom having back ups are essential, not optional in my opinion). It is not about having a perfectly organized house that looks like a Martha Stewart photoshoot (love you Martha, but let’s be real).

It is not about using AI to automate every part of life.

And it is definitely not about pretending that every problem can be solved by an individual making better choices.

A lot of the demands people experience are structural (determinants of health). Workplaces, caregiving expectations, cost of living, housing, policies, social norms, available services, and the unequal distribution of unpaid work all shape what is possible. Personal redesign does not make those things disappear.

However, despite the many broader conditions that need attention, I do think there is still value in asking where I have agency and whether the systems I have built, inherited, or simply drifted into are actually serving me.

Coming up Next…

Starting in September, I’m going to choose one area of life each month and look at it closely. The first area is going to be Clothing & Stuff. This is on my mind because I am currently moving and that process always informs you of just how much stuff you have accumulated. My kids are also constantly outgrowing things and needing new things which also makes it a highly salient area for me at this stage of life.

I’ll map how it currently works, identify the demands and resources involved, question what I am doing and why, try some changes, and see what happens.

I expect some of the experiments will work. Some will probably be ridiculous. Some will create entirely new problems. I will share those too.

The point is not to arrive at a perfectly optimized life.

The point is to see whether I can deliberately use fewer resources on the things that do not matter very much, so I have more available for the things that do 🙂

Technology was Supposed to Save us Time…

I’m not that old, but as an “elder millenial” I am, at times, nostalgic for the simpler, slower times before smartphones happened and our relationship with technology changed so dramatically (for better and worse).

I grew up in Nova Scotia in the 80s and 90s, many of those years without cable TV. I remember my parents renting a VCR from Video Difference for my sister’s 10th birthday so we could watch a movie. It was a big deal.

When I was 9 I asked my parents for a computer for Christmas. I loved reading (and still do) and wanted to be a writer when I grew up and so, obviously, I needed a computer. I did not get a computer. I did, however, get a very old Underwood Typewriter which, while missing the mark entirely for 9-year-old me, is, in retrospect, actually quite charming and thoughtful in its own way.

At any rate, we did eventually get a second-hand Tandy 2000 which I thought was amazing. It required a giant floppy disk to run anything and another one to run a program. We had a writing program and a Jeopardy game (it was so hard!). It wasn’t until junior high that we got our first “modern” computer and dial-up internet started becoming available. We were the teenagers who used ICQ and then MSN messenger, livejournal, MySpace, and so forth. We still spent most of our time doing things in real life (sports, band practice, part-time jobs, hanging out at the mall, etc), we passed handwritten notes in class, watched MuchMusic (and Street Cents, obviously), and called people on landline phones.

Technology has fundamentally changed the university experience over the last several decades. I distinctly remember how difficult it was to check emails and sign up for my university classes in the early 2000s. I had to book a computer at the local library to access the internet to do this and it was painfully slow.

The 2001 university experience looked a lot different than it does today but when is the last time you really thought about it? Personally, it’s been a while since I’ve thought about how much more friction and effort was required to do basically anything back then and how much faster and easier a lot of things are now.

Forget about smartphones – most people didn’t have a cell phone, period. I went to the computer lab to check my email. I wrote papers by hand before typing and printing them (again, in the computer lab). Then I physically dropped them into my professor’s mailbox outside their office.

If I needed a research article, I went to the library, searched the catalogue, found the journal in the stacks, and either read it there or photocopied the pages I needed. Occasionally, it was actually hard to find an article because somebody else was using the only copy. And, every citation had to be typed manually. My version of Zoterro was a shoebox full of index cards with handwritten citations and notes about each reference.

Looking back, it is amazing how much time these routine tasks required. Today, many of those same tasks take seconds. We can search thousands of articles instantly. Reference managers organize our citations (thank goodness!). We collaborate online with colleagues around the world. AI can now summarize information, organize ideas, create rubrics, and answer questions almost as quickly as we ask it to. The productivity gains we have achieved through technology are remarkable.

So why do so many knowledge workers feel busier than ever?

This is the question I keep coming back to.

If technology has made us so much more efficient, why does it feel like we have less time instead of more?

I think it is because technology has changed the nature of work. Yes, many tasks that once took hours now take minutes. At the same time, technology has created entirely new work and more of it. We answer more emails because people can write more emails faster. We attend more meetings because virtual meetings are easy to schedule. We are constantly learning new software, new systems, and now, new AI tools. Peer review (generally speaking) is a hot mess because the volume of submissions keeps increasing while the pool of potential reviewers has not.

The pace of change has accelerated much faster than most of us can realistically adapt to it. As knowledge workers, we are surrounded by an endless firehose of information, decisions, tools, and opportunities. Collaboration, thoughtful scholarship, and teaching and learning take time, mental energy, and patience. Those are all limited resources.

In theory, the time we save through technology should give us more time for deep thinking, creativity, family, rest, and meaningful work. But does it? Imagine comparing a week of work in 2001 versus a week of work now. How much more work are we doing now? (A lot) And why haven’t we banked the time savings of increased productivity and given everyone a 4-day work week (or less)?

More importantly, where exactly are we headed? Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. Instead of thinking of technology as a way to replace as much human labour as possible, I’m interested in exploring how we can redesign work and life in ways that help people contribute in meaningful ways to society and live a good life.

I’m interested to know, what’s one thing that would make your work or life better by not having to do it?

A year-long experiment in redesigning work and life in the age of AI.

Whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence (AI) is the next major technological revolution, and, perhaps, our doom… (hopefully not!). AI is already changing how we work, learn, and make decisions. For knowledge workers in particular, the changes are happening quickly and in wildly different ways. For a lot us (most of us?) AI just sort of popped up into all our digital tools without much warning (or permission) and little to zero guidance.

While I acknowledge the concerns about AI, it is also exciting to be able to figure out new ways of doing things. I can only speak for myself but I have lots of ideas and never enough time! AI has saved me time doing tedious work that would normally take a lot of time or that I wouldn’t even have time to do at all.

You’re probably wondering what kinds of things? Well, things like writing SPSS syntax to recode variable labels, clean up data, and run analyses, creating specific images for me to include in presentations that I have a hard time finding (for example, nurses wearing white scrub tops specifically), and learning how to use code to make my Brightspace course sites more user-friendly for my students (yes, you can do that).

I’ve found myself thinking less about what AI can do and more about what work actually needs to be done in the first place.

We spend a lot of time talking about how AI can help us write emails, summarize meetings, or automate repetitive tasks. Those are worthwhile conversations. But I think there is a deeper question that deserves our attention: Are we doing work that is truly necessary?

And if we are, are we doing it in the best possible way?

These questions have become increasingly important to me because they sit at the intersection of so many of my interests. Throughout my career, I’ve studied leadership, healthy work environments, technology adoption, workforce sustainability, and organizational systems. Long before ChatGPT appeared, I was involved in research exploring the use of technology. These projects include exercise interventions with self-monitoring technologies (via Blackberry phones back in the day), passive home monitoring systems to help older adults age in place, exploring physiotherapists’ use of robotic exoskeletons with rehab patients, and an educational video game to promote careers in nursing homes. Looking back, technology has been a recurring thread throughout much of my work.

I’m also very fortunate to work in a faculty where innovation and creativity are encouraged. For example, our Master’s and PhD programs are primarily online now, which makes it more feasible for mid-career nurses (who are mostly women with job, mortgages, and often, caregiving responsibilities) to pursue advanced degrees. We have also become a leader in virtual reality simulation in undergraduate nursing education. It’s exciting to be part of!

I’ve also always been fascinated by productivity as a way of creating more time for the things that matter most. I love planning and organizing! And even though I love technology (when it’s awesome and works properly), I still use a paper planner in combination with digital tools. I’ve spent years experimenting with different systems, apps, and workflows. I’ve realized that the purpose of planning and creating personal productivity systems is not just to stay organized and “put the big rocks in the jar first” (and yes, those are both important), or to do just do more and more endlessly, but to be able to spend the one precious life that we have creating a meaningful life.

Beginning in September, I’ll be running a series of personal experiments to redesign my work and personal life around a simple question:

How can I spend more of my time doing the things that only I can do?

Each month over the next year, I’m going to focus on one area or theme and consider what’s working well and what isn’t, where I might want to intentionally redesign or establish a new way of doing something, etc.

Some experiments will succeed.

Some will fail.

I’ll write about both.

This isn’t a quest to become infinitely productive or to optimize every minute of my day. If anything, it’s the opposite.

It’s an experiment in stewardship.

How do we use our finite time, energy, attention, and talents more wisely?

How do we reduce unnecessary complexity?

How do we create more space for deep thinking, meaningful work, creativity, family, and rest?

And perhaps the biggest question of all:

If technology keeps making us more efficient, why do so many knowledge workers feel busier than ever?

I don’t have answers yet and that’s the point.

This project is an invitation to explore those questions with me.

Welcome to The Parsimony Project.