Stop Saying You’ll "Do More With Less"

We need to stop using the refrain "Doing More With Less." It's a problematic phrase that tends to cause frustration and confusion with employees. Instead, companies should focus on "Doing More of the Important Work… With Less."

At a basic level, the logic of "Doing More With Less" is flawed. Let's start with an analogy: If your car gets 300 miles on a tank of gas, you can't expect it to take you 400 miles just because you need it to. There are tradeoffs. You either need to adjust your plans or you need to add more fuel. So, why do we assume that our organizations can become unrealistically high-performing machines just because we need them to?

Let's be honest: if your underlying expectation of "Doing More With Less" is simply an expectation that employees will work more hours for the same pay and with fewer support structures, just be up front about that and name it. Few companies take this approach intentionally, but when that's the reality, teams deserve clarity about what's actually being asked of them.

Oftentimes, the concept of "Doing More With Less" is based on an assumption that the team will be more productive despite having fewer resources (time, budget, people). One could argue that the rallying cry to "Do More With Less" might spark more urgency and effort across the team, but the problem remains the same. In reality, what happens is erosion of strategic goals, decrease in work quality, and greater employee burnout. When companies make broad "Do More With Less" mandates, individuals on teams typically respond in one of three ways:

• They decide on their own where to spend their time, which may not align to priorities.
• They try to accomplish as much as possible by spreading their limited time fairly equally across a wide range of activities, resulting in nothing getting accomplished to its full scope.
• They work frantically to accomplish everything as initially scoped, but end up making errors or cutting corners, which increases risk.

Instead, organizations should focus on "Doing More of the Important Work… With Less" by following this approach:

Double-down on Strategic Priorities

Now is the time to be crystal clear about priorities. Even if your company does not have explicitly articulated company goals, you likely have an understanding of which initiatives are more impactful and important to the business than others. Stack rank those initiatives. Communicate these priorities. This will inform how you guide your team to do the most impactful work with limited resources.

Be Clear about What Success Looks Like

Every initiative and every project reaches a point where it begins to see diminishing returns. (For every incremental hour of work spent, you see less ROI.) Be sure that teams have a clear understanding of what "done" looks like for each strategic initiative. This prevents them from falling short on crucial initiatives and prevents them from overinvesting and chasing perfection that yields little incremental ROI.

Scale Back According to Your Priorities

Because you've identified (even informally) what your highest impact initiatives are, and because you've defined what "done" looks like, you can adjust your resource allocation to maximize impact. Ideally, you're allocating most of your resources to the highest priority initiatives so that they remain fully or mostly intact. Then, work your way down the list, always protecting your highest priority items and scaling back lower priority initiatives. Ultimately this will require you to re-scope and reset expectations in terms of what can be accomplished and how close to "done" you can get in each initiative. Don't forget to confer with your cross-functional colleagues to understand any key dependencies that could affect your decision process.

Be Realistic About Scoping

There's a tendency to hedge on the original resource allocations for the work planned. If you initially scoped a project to require 10 hours of work, don't assume you can get the same work done in 5 hours simply because that's all the time you have available. Resist the urge to second-guess your resource allocation estimate in order to back into a number that fits within your current resource constraints. Instead, rescope the project to deliver as much as possible with the available hours.

Communicate Your Adjusted Work Plan

This is a simple step, but it's where many teams fall down. Be sure to communicate (up, down, and across) regarding your adjusted plans. The team you manage needs to be crystal clear about where they should apply their energy, what "done" looks like, and what initiatives they should stop working on. Your cross-functional colleagues need to understand what you'll be delivering and when, and they need to understand whether any descoped or discontinued activities will affect them. You'll also need to manage up to the C-suite to clarify (and frequently reiterate) the scope changes and anticipated deliverables that are aligned to strategic priorities.

Don’t Rely Too Heavily on Artificial Intelligence

Although AI is providing remarkable time efficiencies in many aspects of our work, don't overestimate how much AI can impact productivity, especially in the near term. Creating AI agents, establishing systems and protocols, validating and refining outputs all takes time. According to McKinsey (2025), only 1% of businesses have reached the point where it's actually changing what their teams can do at scale. Banking your success on having AI save the day can have significant risks, especially if your organization is still in the early stages of integrating into your processes.

When teams are asked to take on more work without clear priorities or adjusted expectations, the result tends to be burnout, missed goals, and execution risk. Making hard decisions about priorities, and communicating them clearly, is what determines whether you reach your destination or end up on the side of the road with an empty tank.