Doing More Isn't Worth Much; Those Who Can Decide What Not to Do Are Worth More

During that period, my OKR was densely packed with over a dozen items, looking full of purpose. Yet at year-end, I didn't dare bring it up proactively.

Not because I hadn't worked—on the contrary, I was busy as a spinning top: one task after another on Jira, endless meetings, endless documents, coordinating, patching holes, covering bases, firefighting...

But during the review, I suddenly realized something suffocating: I had done a lot, but none of it was scoreable.

On the other hand, another colleague focused on a single goal for the entire quarter, steadily pushing forward, and produced a chain of results that impacted the whole team. He got promoted at year-end.

At that moment, I was a bit dazed—the problem wasn't that I wasn't working hard enough, but that I was too easily dazzled by "having a lot to do."

I began to seriously look back at those so-called "important tasks" and found that many of them weren't actually that urgent, didn't necessarily require me specifically, and even after completion, few people remembered them.

Truly valuable work isn't about how much you do, but whether the few things you do can make a decisive difference.

Many people think that doing more means higher output. But I increasingly feel there's no necessary connection between the two.

Later, I worked with a senior product manager and learned a particularly piercing saying: "If you build ten features in a month and eight of them are unused, you're manufacturing garbage."

It sounds harsh, but it's reality. We deliver, review, and launch every week, but looking back, what the business actually remembers and what impacts user experience might be just one or two things.

And so I gradually understood:

It's not that doing more makes you valuable; it's that daring not to do worthless things shows better judgment.

This sounds easy but is extremely hard in practice. Because "not doing" itself is easily misunderstood as laziness, slacking, or shirking. But look at those who get promoted quickly and are trusted by senior leadership—they learned to "cut" early on.

I remember a colleague who wrote in his mid-year OKR review: "Deleted 30% of the backlog." At first I thought he was joking, but he seriously explained that he spent a month going through the entire backlog and directly proposed to product and his manager which items "could be not done," because even if done, they wouldn't bring business results.

By cutting these, he freed up 40% of the team's capacity to focus on polishing one core aggregation solution, which eventually became a platform API.

His year-end summary was just eight characters: "Strategic focus, visible results." Clean, powerful, not exhausting, yet extremely valuable.

I also started practicing this "cutting ability." No longer blindly starting work, but asking myself three questions before taking on any task:

If this isn't done, will something go wrong? After it's done, will there be a substantive change to the business? Besides me, who else can do it? Can someone else take it over?

These questions sound a bit harsh, but once they become a habit, you'll quickly see whether you're being held hostage by trivial matters.

The old habit of "whoever calls, I respond; whoever throws something, I catch it" was gradually replaced by a calmer rhythm: I no longer do things "I can do," but only things "that must be done by me."

There's no mysterious technique here; it's more of a shift in mindset: not saying "I won't do it," but saying "I need to work with choice."

Once, product wanted to add a "data visualization page." After hearing about it, I felt it was completely unnecessary in the short term—it wouldn't affect conversion, and there was no user feedback. I didn't directly refuse, but said: "Let me first evaluate the technical cost and existing components, and after making a judgment, we can decide."

This "evaluation" process bought me time and let the other party know I wasn't saying "no," but "let's think it through before deciding."

Later, the matter was never brought up again.

My takeaway is simply this: The better you can articulate "why not do it now," the more people trust your judgment.

I know many people are afraid to give up, afraid of missing opportunities, afraid of being seen as "not proactive." But ultimately, opportunities have density, and output has cost.

Doing ten things with no impact is worse than doing one thing that can show results. Saving time to settle down and do that one truly scoreable thing will instead make others see you as reliable, steady, and methodical.

This is different from "laziness."

So if you often feel tired, fragmented, and unmotivated, ask yourself: Have I taken on too many things that "could actually be not done" recently? Is there any task I accepted just because someone pushed it to me? Is there any "important item" that is actually just "seemingly urgent"?

It's not that you can immediately cut everything, but you need to learn to see: Not all tasks deserve the same cost from you.

We don't lack "capability"; what we lack is the judgment of "should this be done."

Often, the real watershed in the workplace isn't how much you've done, but whether you dare to say— "We're not doing this."

That sentence is the mark of you beginning to have decision-making power.

And only from that moment on, others no longer see you merely as an executor, but as a trustworthy collaborator, even a future leader.

Have you made any "decisive cuts"? What were the results after cutting?

This may be the starting point for us to move from "people who do work" to "people who make choices."