The more we do, the more poorly we do it. The less we do, the more space we have and the better able we are to fully show up for the things that are getting our devoted presence and attention.
– Kate Northrup
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
What would your life be like with enough time for the things that matter the most to you? What if you could access a secret productivity superpower that’s always been there, but you just didn’t know you had?
In our culture, the way we work isn’t working. Our addiction to busyness and our obsession with always trying to do more leads up to feeling like we’re always failing our families, our careers, our spouses, and ourselves. We need to revolutionize the way we work. How do we fix the system? It’s about discovering a system within ourselves, in our daily work lives, and in our homes.
Kate Northrup is a mother of two, a bestselling author, and an entrepreneur committed to helping women light up the world without burning themselves out. Kate joins us to discuss her approach based on her book Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Ambitious Women. In this episode, you’ll learn practical, relatively easy-to-implement strategies for having more by doing less.
SHOW NOTES
Do Less Book | Do Less Planner | Try the Do Less Planner | Kate Northrup Instagram |
Erica Chidi | Patriarchy Stress Disorder by Dr. Valerie Rain
Episode Transcription
Kate Northrup
The more we do, the more poorly we do it. The less we do, the more space we have the better able to fully show up for the things that are getting our devoted presence and attention.
Vanessa Cornell
Welcome to The NUSHU Podcast. I’m your host, Vanessa Cornell. I invite you with love into this space to learn and grow with me. And for a brief moment of the day, come home to yourself.
Vanessa Cornell
Welcome back to The NUSHU Podcast. Today I speak with Kate Northrup, best selling author of the book Do Less, and an amazing entrepreneur and teacher. Let me tell you a little bit about what Kate has done for me. You may know that I have five children. I also run a business, NUSHU, which includes this podcast plus courses and groups and lots of other programming. And I also run a separate business which is a family vineyard in California. So five kids and two businesses, and I am less busy and have more free time now than when I had one child. It seems impossible. But it is true. If you want to know what it feels like to not be overwhelmed all the time, to not have an endless to do list. To not always feel like you’re juggling and not quite ever getting things under control, you are really going to want to tune in to this one. True to her books name. Kate teaches us how to literally do less, but also at the same time achieve more the way she does it is fascinating and unexpected. One quick note, as Kate says in the episode, she is not a doctor or a scientist. So if you have questions about some of the science, she references in the episode, we’ve listed some resources Kate mentions in the show notes so that you can check them out herself. Thanks as always for being with us. We’re so glad you’re here.
Vanessa Cornell
Kate, the first time I heard you speak, it just blew my mind. And I want to get into the way that you’ve really cracked the code on being more productive without the burnout without the grind culture. But first I want to ask you what was your aha moment the grinding is not what I want to do, and it’s not working for me.
Kate Northrup
So my aha moment was sitting in my accountant’s office with a one year old baby girl. I had a first year of motherhood that really tested me and brought me to my knees as I know I am not the only one. From the pregnancy to the birth to this first year of her life. My daughter was sick with really severe eczema and was scratching herself bloody and my first year of motherhood looked more like a horror movie than like a catalogue of Facebook posts that I had seen from my friends. And that first year I worked less than half the amount I had ever worked before I had 10 hours of childcare a week, just zero bandwidth. I had postpartum insomnia, postpartum anxiety, I just like didn’t even know my head from my tail, you know, and, and yet, there we were in our accountants office. And we realize that that year, both me and my husband, I ran a company with him had worked less than half the amount ever before and had been like, it wasn’t even that I didn’t have bandwidth for our business. I just didn’t care. Like, he just was like I am trying to get through the day. And I barely doing that. But we looked at the numbers, and we realized, Oh, wait, we made the same amount of revenue this year, as we had previous years working twice as much. So what? Yes. And it was really that inquiry into Okay, I don’t want to repeat a year like this ever again. Yeah, but what are some of the elements like what were the shifts that we made by necessity, and by default, and sort of out of a situation of extremes that we could implement on purpose in a more spacious way, so that we could make more money while working less but also really, like, have more life? Yeah, and less laptop time, and more joy and, and all those things. And so I figured, well, if I could do this, other people could as well. I don’t have any special degrees. I don’t have any special, no special things. You know, I think some people can look and be like, Oh, well that person has this that or other higher education or that person has a trust fund or that person or whatever, and having come from a long line of overworking women. I just thought I like it ends with me. Don’t want to look back 30 years from now and wish I’d spent time with my kids like, yeah, motherhood is hard. But like I’m just starting, maybe I could actually do both.
Vanessa Cornell
So let’s dive into you not being so special, because I take issue with that. but hear me out. I think it’s not enough to just say, I don’t want to work as hard, right? Certain things have to be in place. And I think that you’re you’re special because your capacity to to see what’s important and to align with what you wanted to do. were sort of the prerequisites to having this more easy flow. What are the things that need to be in place in order to put yourself in a position to adopt a lot of your very specific strategies in your book, Do Less, which I really appreciate? But I think maybe some of those strategies don’t work. If some bigger picture, things aren’t in place. And so what are those sort of bigger picture things?
Kate Northrup
This is a conversation that, of course, is intersectional. Right? So it has, it certainly has to do with levels of privilege. And so I am a white cisgendered woman living in the United States, I grew up with class privilege. And so I have had a certain amount of choice around what I’ve chosen to do with my work and my career that may not be available to others. So I want to say that that’s the lens, which is like, I think one of the most important conversations we can have, if that conversation is available to us is am I giving myself permission to look into what I love to do? And is it possible that what I love to do could intersect with how I make my money. But that whole idea that like, it’s normal, to think our work is drudgery is a huge enemy, to the conversation about doing less than So when I say like I want to work less and make more money. The truth is, I really love my work. And so then it’s really looking at our culture relationship to work. The degree to which our tendency to work too much and push too hard, is an adaptation based on trauma. And I first heard that articulated by Erica Chidi Cohen, who’s an incredible thought leader, writer, doula birth advocate. And I just about fell on the floor when I heard about productivity as a trauma response. And so ever since I learned about that, that was probably in January of this year, I’m completely obsessed. I’m completely obsessed with trauma and the nervous system and our body and and how the way we work is actually wired in some of us as a response to, to pain.
Vanessa Cornell
Yeah, there are days when I wake up, and my husband calls it being when I’m in the zone, like don’t talk to mommy, she’s in the zone where I can crank out 350 emails in two hours, I am just on fire. And there are days when I wake up and I look at my inbox. I’m like, No, you’re not today. I can’t, I can’t. But I used to spend a lot of time beating myself up on those days, because I thought why can’t I pull myself together to be productive on this day? Give us a little summary of that, because it really shifted completely my relationship to my own body and my cycle and my mood and what I needed in the moment.
Kate Northrup
Yeah, so what I learned is that testosterone dominant people operate on a 24 hour hormonal cycle that basically repeats every 24 hours. Estrogen dominant people, however, operate on a 28ish day, hormonal cycle. Now given you know, cycles can be different lengths of time, but let’s just say on average, our whole world and the way we organize time and run businesses is all organized around a 24 hour cycle, every planner system, every time management system, the whole freaking thing is organized around the idea that we should feel the exact same way every day, if not better, if not more in the zone, if not more on fire than the day before. So those of us who are estrogen dominant, have lived our lives feeling like there’s something wrong with us, but there’s not some thing wrong was that with us, it’s just that nobody thought about us when they were creating the systems because they were created by testosterone dominant people. That’s called The Patriarchy. And it’s so exciting when you realize like, oh, the way I experienced time is really different. And so over 28 days-ish, you’ll actually, if you are an estrogen dominant person, which PS you don’t have to have a period, in order for this to apply, often, trans women who are on HRT will experience symptoms, even though they don’t technically have a period, they experience hormonal symptoms in a very predictable, 28ish day cycle, we go through these four phases of our cycle that mimic the seasons, we go through every month, a personal winter, spring, summer, fall. And we have these incredible ebbs and flows. And each one of our little mini seasons has so much value, and there’s a reason for it. So there is no waste in nature, right? Like, nothing exists just for the heck of it. There’s no accident. And so the fact that we have these four energetic phases, and they’re organized so that we can get done exactly what needs to get done in this beautiful, cyclical manner. It’s just so amazing. And when I started to learn about this, I was like, Whoa, if this so my body works, and it mimics the four phases of the moon, and it mimics these four seasons, if this is good enough for the planet, and to keep all of life going on planet Earth, probably this would be good enough for my creative projects. And my business, I’ve extrapolated and created a whole project management system, based on these four phases. These four sort of energetic, you know, imprints.
Vanessa Cornell
It is so mind blowing, when you see it in the macro and the context of the planet and the seasons. But it is also mind blowing, when you can lean into a phase of your cycle as being exactly the right thing right now, in that phase of your cycle, where all you want to do is like put your sweat pants on and crawl under the covers and watch sad movies to make you even sadder. It’s like, actually, this is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. Because this is an opportunity for me to feel all those feelings that I’m maybe too busy to feel the other weeks.
Kate Northrup
Well and like then when you so yes, so there’s the emotional aspect. But then also, then we find out Oh, tears actually release excess estrogen from the body. So there’s also like all of this really cool biological necessity for so like your yearning to watch sad movies to make you cry even more, is actually this innate knowing in your body that that’s like a positive biological process to help you heal. Our body has this beautiful design, nature has this beautiful design. What if we actually followed it?
Vanessa Cornell
Yeah. So let’s talk about that, that knowing. How much of your success do you think is about your self awareness about your own ability to tune into yourself and frankly, believing in yourself and your intuition when you’re making decisions? It’s so huge.
Kate Northrup
I mean, I think it’s everything and and I do want to give a shout out to my mom, she did a beautiful job in instilling in me that I can trust myself. So now as a mother of daughters, I have a two and a half year old and an almost five year old. I am so focused on having them believe themselves. So like letting them know Yeah, if it feels bad, it’s bad. If it feels good, it’s good. There. So they’re little enough that they don’t have all the things and I just want to preserve like, my daughter this morning, we were sitting in our driveway. And I was like, Penelope, come here, give me a hug. She’s almost like she was like, No, you can have a hug when you drop me off at beansprouts, which is her freaking camp. Okay, now, here’s what we do with that, right? Like, we just take the hug, right? Like, whether it’s grandparents or whoever that’s like, Oh, just come over here. Right? And I was like, great, no problem. I look forward to that hug or like, really, you are ready to give it to me.
Vanessa Cornell
We’re like that’s not nice. Please come and give us hugs.
Kate Northrup
I was like, she doesn’t want to hug. It’s her body. And I was like, that’s cool, like totally great. So we can preserve it. But then how do we find that in ourselves? Well, here’s what’s so beautiful like it’s in there. It just got quieter. So we just have to be in this place. Practice of remembering. And there’s a tool in my last planner that I just I love it so much. It’s called the daily energy tracker. And it, it begins to a tune us. But I’m going to tell you what it is incredibly in a simpler way, simple way. So you could use a journal, you don’t have to like go get the planner. I mean, you could but here’s what you would do, you would just write it down. What day of your cycle you’re on, if you are a person with a period, so you know, day one through 42, what phase of your cycle Are you in. And this will take a little like new learning, but you’ll either be in the menstrual phase, the follicular phase, the ovulation phase, or the luteal phase. And each one of those has kind of like a different energetic signature. So you’ll kind of get a feeling like the menstrual phase is rest and restore. The follicular phase is planning initiate the ovulation phase is connecting be visible and the luteal phase is complete. And then you just maybe like to make a note about what’s my focus intention priority for the day? And then what do I actually feel like doing? And then the second part of that question is, how can I honor that even in a small way? So let’s say I’m in a day where I feel like putting on my sweat pants and watching all the movies that make me cry. But I have back to back interviews all day. Okay, well, then I might look at my schedule and say, Okay, well, I’m not going to cancel all those interviews, because, you know, first of all, I could, I probably wouldn’t, because then it makes for more rescheduling you down the line. But I would look and say, Okay, well, could I honor the part of me that wants to curl up. And instead of sitting at my desk, doing my interviews, could I sit on the couch and do them like so, there’s so much about this is listening for what we want, and then giving it to ourselves in small ways to rebuild the connection, where we know, there’s so many little ways that we can tend and care for ourselves. So that the how, like when I’m doing work, when I’m creating, I always play the peaceful piano station on Spotify, because it makes me feel smarter. It makes me feel like more calm. It’s such a minor thing. But I do it because it puts me in this particular zone. So the little things like that are beautiful ways to love ourselves and to listen for what it is that we want. And our bodies and our emotions. And our inner wisdom will respond by giving us more of themselves when we listen just even in small ways. Because little girls and little boys, little people know what they want. My two year old is very clear about her now. And she’s very clear about her. Yes. And if I can just help her to not forget. I think she’ll be good to go.
Vanessa Cornell
Right. Yeah, I try to do that too. I try to make my workday pleasant. So let’s go back to your Do Less book and your Do Less Planner.
Kate Northrup
I made it so I could start printing out all my worksheets because what I did first is I had this journaling practice, and then it became kind of more of a PDF situation that I had created for my membership origin. And then I just created it as a bound book for my origin members. And then over time, it became this thing for the world. So anyway, so the Do Less Planner has these it’s self dated, because one of the things that drive me crazy as a planner afficionado myself having bought every planner under the sun, it drove me crazy that I would like get into it. And then due to the ebb and flow of life, I would like stop for a couple months. And then I would come back to it and be like, Oh, god, look at this huge chunk of pages. I can’t use them now. Now I feel guilty. Now I’m wasting paper now it’s bad for the planet is holding. So it’s just self dated. So you can start and stop whenever you feel like and it has different sections that help you to tune into your own cyclical energy, so that you can get to know how you actually feel and work with it as opposed to against it, knowing that the innate wisdom of your biology is already setting you up for success if you would just listen. So that’s kind of what the planner I mean, that’s like the Gestalt version. Love it. Love it. And I will say like I’m working on, I’m noodling on an idea around why the five year plan is dead.
Vanessa Cornell
How do we think about a different way of being an entrepreneur and pursuing a business without that five year figure out what you want to get to in five years work your way backwards?
Kate Northrup
So first of all, I would also like to say that I’ve never had a business plan. I wouldn’t even know how to write one and I do have a seven figure business. I don’t think you need to have one. I don’t even know what it would entail when we are so obsessed that we’re supposed to be living in To this plan, and there’s a picture of what our life is supposed to be, then when it doesn’t turn out that way, we think we screwed it up. But we can’t screw up life. We can only live it. And so I love like this whole thing of Okay, yes, I have a vision, yes, I’m going places. And also, there may be something better in store for me. So what I’m going to do today is the next right thing that’s being able to hold both. And it’s very different than taking what comes. A lot of people live like, well, I don’t know, I’m just gonna kind of like, see what happens then. And there needs to be, I think, an element of agency, like I’m stepping into the ring here. And then I’m going to dance with the universe, I’ll see, I’ll see. But I’m going to bring my part and then I’m going to see what else is brought. And then I’m going to make magic out of that, as opposed to like, let me sit here on the sidelines and just wait for what comes or let me try to conduct the entire universe, because that will definitely leave you exhausted, and frustrated.
Vanessa Cornell
Let’s talk about that balance of how do you create the space for the creative energy for the vision to then go execute the vision, I never imagined I would ever start a business. I was raised super risk averse, super, like I was like one of those a students that was like only getting the A for the grade, and care anything about what I was learning. That’s sort of like that was my mentality. Yeah. So to create something with no sort of way of measuring success was really different for me. And what I discovered was, Oh, my God, I’m a creative person. I have all of this creative energy flowing out of me all of these ideas and things I want to do. And I think that that came from not grinding all day.
Kate Northrup
Now. Yes, right. Because here’s what’s so fascinating. When we start to look at neuroscience and psychology, when we are rushing, doing too many things, in a state of fight or flight stressed, it makes us less effective, less focused, and it makes us make bad decisions, or not be able to make decisions at all, which is a total sellout. And so oddly, the more we do, the less we do more, the more we do, the more poorly we do it, the less we do, the more space we have, the better able to fully show up for the things that are getting our devoted presence and attention we are able to show up for so it becomes this really beautiful, slightly counterintuitive thing where we think, oh, if I want to be more successful, I have to do more things. Right, like, let me get all the things on my resume. Let me get all the extracurriculars for my college application. I was totally like same, you know, same thing. Let me do all the things and show how well rounded and fabulous I am. Yeah. And then at the end of the day, it’s like, go great. So I’m kind of sucky at a lot of different photos, or I’m like, mediocre, right? Like, I’m mediocre at a lot of things. What did that is not a good life. What about like the passion of the devotion to a few wonderful things, and then giving ourselves the space? And the the the sort of luxury of being able to think about all the possible permutations within that choice. So it becomes this odd dichotomy of like, yes. Creativity. Yes. explosiveness Yes, leaning into big visions, and also the beautiful boundaries of commitment to a few things. Because what happens is when we choose like, okay, going all in on my kids, I’m going all in on my marriage. I’m going all in on these two projects.
Vanessa Cornell
So okay, I have to ask you this question, because I hear you. And I get it. Yeah. But I still have that voice in my head. That’s like, you’re lazy. You didn’t do enough today. It’s still there. It’s like, I can see it for what it is. But damn, I can’t make it go away.
Kate Northrup
I mean, me neither. I wish. I wish I had like a pill for you. But I will say this, the voice gets quieter, the more we practice. I also really recommend and I think you know, your group is a wonderful place for this or wherever people find support. Beginning to surround ourselves with people doing it in a new way who can hold our toes to the fire to be like, Hey, I think you’re overdoing it. So I would recommend surrounding yourself with Few people who can hold you accountable to the do last way and who you can each uplift and celebrate when you’re actually really going for it in the new paradigm. I love that. It’s very freeing. Yeah, that’s awesome.
Vanessa Cornell
So I have one question here about menopause. You have mentioned testosterone dominant estrogen dominant. You don’t have to have your period menopause to write if you’ve already gone through menopause.
Kate Northrup
Yeah. So or if you’re in perimenopause, or if you’re pregnant, or if you’ve had a hysterectomy, or a radical hysterectomy, there’s so many circumstances why you may not have a period. But here’s what’s so cool, even in Metapod is actually more in menopause. When I speak with women who are postmenopausal, they find that they’re more in tune with the lunar cycles than they ever were before. So it’s actually more of a lunar time of life. Also, what’s so cool when you begin to study the hormonal reality of menopause. Our culture has really done a terrible PR campaign. And what’s so exciting about menopause is that your levels of FSH and LH which are these, I don’t remember what they stand for, because I’m not a doctor. But they’re the hormones that are really high during ovulation. So during your cycling years, they go up and down and up and down. after menopause, they stay high at ovulation levels for the rest of your life. So there’s so much good news about menopause. And if you want to learn more, I recommend my mom’s book called The Secret Pleasures of Menopause. But all that to say you still have cyclical energy, and it’ll be more in tune with the moon for many people. The moon affects all of us, it creates tides. When it’s a full moon, there are more visits to the emergency room and more crimes committed. We are lunar creatures in a really interesting way. Have you studied biodynamic farming? It’s so fascinating to learn about farming practices with the moon. This is not Whoo, this is science. I just don’t think there’s like any big money in funding, research up the moon. I trackable, so I track my own menstrual cycle. And then I also track the moon. And it’s really gotten fascinating to sort of like, see how the two interplay, and that’s a little bit more advanced. But anyway, if you don’t have a period for a variety of whatever the reason is, track the moon, you can put it right in your Google Calendar. I also like the app called The Moon Calendar, which is wonderful. You just use it to learn about it.
Vanessa Cornell
So let’s back up a little bit to the book you wrote before Do Less is about money. And I want to ask you about it specifically in the context of people, mostly women, asking for what they’re worth, hmm, how can we liberate ourselves from whatever we’ve been taught what we’re supposed to do, in order to really claim what we’re worth?
Kate Northrup
So interestingly enough, it’s the same exact conversation as Do Less, just a different substance. Now, we’re talking about money instead of time. And so our relationship to money, and our relationship to time has everything to do with our relationship to our worth. Now, we all have grown up in a culture that still very much tells us that women are not as worthy as men. Yes, third wave feminism, yes, we’ve come a long way. And we have a hell of a long way to go. And so I read this fascinating book called Patriarchy Stress Disorder by Dr. Valerie Rain, which I highly recommend to everybody. And in it, she really shares the data about, I’m back on trauma now, about trauma and how, which is not a funny topic. But when we are raised in a patriarchy, there actually, it actually is a syndrome that women will experience, because we have the big t traumas that we’ve gone through personally, the little t traumas that we’ve gone through personally, then we have the collective trauma of watching other women harmed in our country and in other countries, so that actually lives in our bodies as well. And then we have the ancestral trauma, which now we know is very real due to with the study of epigenetics, where what happened to our grandmothers and our great grandmother’s and on and on and on, also lives in our bodies. For 1000s of years, it has been unsafe to be a woman. It has been particularly unsafe to be a powerful woman who stands out. So do you think with all of those levels of trauma in our body and all of that cellular memory, of being killed for being powerful and standing out, we’re going to go into a job interview and ask for what we’re worth. So no. So I Just want to say like, the whole conversation around women asking for what they’re worth, when we get stuck at mindset are completely missing the boat, you cannot think your way out of the pattern of your body trying to keep you safe. It’s a really wonderful evolutionary strategy to stay small. It has served us and it’s time for something new. And so there’s such beautiful work, I am not a practitioner of this work, but whether you know, you go work with EMDR, or, or the Emotional Freedom Technique, tapping or yoga, you know, breathwork, meditation, somatic therapy, like there’s so many wonderful tools to heal trauma, heal your nervous system and learn to signal safety in your body. Because once you have learned to signal safety in your body and move from fight or flight into rest and restore, then you don’t even have to think about asking for what you’re worth, you just know you’re worthy. And then you just ask for more. Right? Right. So what I’m saying is, we have to heal our trauma.
Vanessa Cornell
Yeah. So tell us how we can find you. Tell us what you’re offering. And then I want to know if you’ve got any new ideas that you can share, because I know your mind is like so I knew I knew. I mean, I’ve always gotten new ideas cooking.
Kate Northrup
What we did in our company, just for FYI, it was really helpful. Lisia, who used to be our company president who remains a dear friend, she actually had a jar. And when I would send her or tell her a new idea, she would write it down and put it in the jar. And then if I brought it up again, she would pull it out of the jar, but otherwise, it just stayed in the jar. And she didn’t tell me that until she left. I was like oh my god. That’s hilarious. Because she just knew like the the quantity so far outpaced what we had the capacity for. And I have historically had a tendency to cannibalize on my own ideas by starting too many of them in case anybody else is like that. That’s a tip.
Kate Northrup
I do have a guide, a weekly planning ritual that kind of gives you a taste for what’s in the Do Less Planner, it gives you a portion of it. So if you want to check that out, just to get started with this material and get it like operationalized and make it practical. You can go to katenorthrup.com/list and you can get that for free. So that’s one thing. And then I’m the most present on social media on Instagram @KateNorthrup. We’ve got the Do Less Planner over at dolessplanner.com, which is really a beautiful offering. I’m just so frickin proud of this baby. And then new ideas. You know, I’m just like thinking so much right now about the planets, and about our physical bodies, and about the way we treat one another’s bodies. And why? You know, it’s not a fully formed idea right now. But what I am fascinated by is how our bodies work, how our bodies are part of nature, how the human family interacts, how even viruses interact with human bodies, and some of the benefits of how they interact with the human body and just really looking at ourselves as part of the ecosystem, as opposed to as in charge of the ecosystem. And how can we bring that to our work lives is really the question that I’m here to live into in my work.
Vanessa Cornell
I can’t wait to hear more. Thank you, Kate, so much for being with me today.
Kate Northrup
Thank you, Vanessa. This was so much fun and such a pleasure to be with you today.
Vanessa Cornell
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, we welcome you to stay close and discover more of our offerings. Check us out on Instagram @nushu or visit nushu.com for more.
