Addition by Subtraction

Getting better by doing less.

I just got back from a business conference where I did something unusual for me: I barely took notes.

Most conferences bury you in information. You fly home with dozens of pages of cryptic handwritten notes, a laundry list of new tactics, and the vague guilt of knowing you won’t implement any of them.

This time, I decided it would be better to leave with fewer commitments than I arrived with.

Here are five things I’m thinking about this week:

The best session I attended was titled “(Re)ducer.” It was built around a detail from music producer Rick Rubin’s career. On his first album credit, LL Cool J’s Radio, the liner notes read “Reduced by Rick Rubin,” instead of “produced.”

Rubin’s job was to strip away everything that obscured the music, not to add more. He explained…