You Don't Need More Time. You Need to Stop Giving Yours Away.

Welcome to Subtract to Succeed. If you’re exhausted by doing everything “right” and ready to try the opposite, you’re in the right place.

I’m Nell, and I help ambitious, big-hearted leaders escape the addition trap and build their subtraction muscle. Because doing less, more intentionally, is the only path to a life that feels as good as it looks.

An hour before Neal Schore was due at the beach with his three young sons — the Northern Michigan trip he’d been anticipating for a year — his private equity partner texted: could he hop on a 15-minute call? The topic was an acquisition Neal already knew they’d never do. He agreed to the call anyway.

An hour and forty-five minutes later, he was still in the car, parked facing the water, watching his family play without him. By the time he hung up, the kids were spent and it was time to head back to the hotel.

His kids don’t remember that day. He’s never forgotten it.

That’s the moment the 25th hour was born, not as a time management system, but as a paradigm shift. Because the lesson Neal took from the beach wasn’t “work less.” It was sharper: we don’t lack time. We give it away.

The appeasements and accommodations are where our hours actually go — the calls we take to seem available, the meetings we attend out of FOMO or fear of irrelevance, the yeses we hand out to dodge a moment of discomfort. Sound familiar, my fellow over-givers?

That’s also why I wanted Neal (founder and CEO of The 25th Hour Group and author of The 25th Hour, out August 11) for Optimism Month. Most time management advice is addition: a new habit, a new app, a new system stacked on a life that’s already full.

Neal’s premise runs the other way. The 25th hour isn’t hiding in a reformatted calendar. It’s the dividend you earn when you stop handing your hours to things that don’t deserve them. This reclaimed time is a dividend from subtracting.

A few insights from our conversation that I want to be sure to pass on, even if you don’t watch the interview (above):

Meet your robot. Neal’s central character is the robot each of us starts programming around kindergarten (lunch at 11:37, recess for 18 minutes, line up, reading circle for 23 minutes) until we’re fully automated: climb the corporate ladder, run meetings the way your boss ran them (with a few new HBR tricks woven in), treat people the way you were treated (even if you hated it).

His word for all this is “ordinary,” and he’s careful to say there’s nothing wrong with ordinary. You can get promoted, paid, and recognized in that mode. But if you bother to reprogram the robot — start with trust instead of demanding it be earned, turn the 30-minute meeting into a five-minute debrief — and what changes is what he calls your joy profile.

I’d suggest Neal’s robot theory is optimistic, and even liberating: if it’s programming, it’s not a character flaw. Programs can be rewritten.

The daily stand-up that ate 15,000 hours. A founder Neal worked with had held an hour-long all-hands every morning since the Day One — a generous instinct that stopped scaling somewhere around employee 30. Neal’s prescription: cut it to once a week, 30 minutes, on rotating days. People cheered. Then, freed to design their own mornings, they started arriving earlier. Turnover fell from double digits to 2-3%. All told, an estimated 15,000 hours a year of engaged human hours were returned to the company.

My favorite part is how he got the founder to agree: they priced the fear. What’s the worst that could happen, and what are the odds of that worst case scenario? They discussed potential outcomes and realized that the worst would only happen about 2% of the time.

“If I gave you an investment with a 98% chance of success,” Neal asked, “how much time would you spend worrying about the 2%?” The founder couldn’t hesitate after that framing.

Subtraction is an experiment, and almost every experiment is reversible. If it fails, restart the meeting. We’re not closing a factory or cutting a department or product line.

It’s not knowledge. It’s permission. Neal’s clients are brilliant. Knowledge is never the barrier to growth. What’s missing is permission to do things differently, countering decades of programming. He included himself: it took two clients independently insisting before he believed anyone would want the book he’d been teaching for twenty years. Even the teacher needed permission.

He also gave us the smallest possible starting rep for the subtraction muscle: break any automatic sequence. Put your pants on other-leg-first tomorrow. Swap the order of shower and brushing your teeth. It sounds silly (Neal got caught mid-shower by his wife, climbing out to brush his teeth mid-sequence, announcing “I’m breaking the sequence!”) but the point is real: you won’t subtract on autopilot.

And because he practices the honesty he preaches: Neal admitted he’s currently in what he calls his hysterical-hypocrite era — teaching self-management while sprinting through a book launch with an insane calendar.

It took his son (who’s also his business partner) interrupting a calendar-commiseration spiral to say, “You know you’re in your ordinary right now, right?” Instead of getting defensive, Neal thanked him. That’s the practice: not perfection, just a shorter distance between autopilot and noticing.

Watch our full conversation above. And pre-order The 25th Hour now — pre-orders matter enormously to authors, and this one’s full of research-backed and fun tools that you’ll actually use, and be glad to pass on.

Your question to sit with today is Neal’s favorite, the one I turned on him at the end:

What would you stop doing if no one would judge you for stopping?

(Bonus points: spend a few minutes considering that they probably actually wouldn’t judge you.)

See you tomorrow for your daily Subtraction soundtrack! Keep on rollin’,
Nell