Author: Mats Alvesson
Reading time: 20 minutes
Synopsis
The Art of Less (2025) looks at how daily problems stop us from doing important work and make companies slow. It shows how too many rules, tasks, and things we expect create “sludge”. This sludge takes away energy and makes work worse. The book also gives useful ways to remove these problems. So you can focus on what is truly important.
What’s in it for me? Learn how to achieve more by doing less
Most workplaces have times that make you feel confused. You open your laptop to say yes to a small buy. But you find it needs three people to agree and a ticket in a system that often fails. You join a weekly meeting to make sure everyone agrees, but no decisions are made. You fill out a form. The information collected is never used. You use many apps that promise to make your day easier. But somehow you have less time than before. By lunchtime, you have done many small jobs but very little real work.
This is what “sludge” looks like. You see it in daily tasks no one asked for. Or in training that teaches the same things each year. Or in projects that continue even when their goal is gone. Bosses get many requests for new plans. Middle managers try to fit these plans into their busy schedules. Workers doing the main job have systems that ask for more proof of work than the work itself. Add checks to follow rules, advice from experts, and changing goals. Even simple days feel stuck.
This problem makes people tired. It makes people lose focus. It slows down choices. It turns teams who want to work well into tired ones. But sludge is not something you cannot control. Teams can find where it starts. They can learn why it grows. And they can remove it before it becomes normal. Small actions make a bigger difference than many think. This Blink will show you how sludge gets into daily work. It will also show what you and your team can do to fight it, make things simple, and make room for real progress.
Blink 1 – Sludge slows progress and drains energy
Sludge appears when work is harder than it should be. It is like unseen mud that slows down work and fills up your schedule. This word first came from rules for the public. There, some processes quietly made life harder for people. Today, in companies, sludge explains why easy tasks take a long time. It explains why teams get stuck filling out forms over and over. It explains why people who want to work well slowly lose their drive.
For bosses and teams who want to do good work, understanding sludge is useful and freeing. It names the problems everyone feels but often cannot say exactly what they are. Once it has a name, it is easier to see, question, and take away.
Sludge often starts with good ideas. A company adds a step to follow rules after a small problem happens. A team starts using a “quick” report to tell others what is happening. A manager starts a new meeting to make sure everyone is on the same page. Each step seems fine, even helpful. But over time, these small things add up. They become extra forms, extra meetings, and extra approvals. What once seemed good now slows down everyone’s time and makes them feel bad.
Companies create sludge in ways we can expect. Bosses do not see the whole picture of how work really happens. So they add new steps without seeing the extra effort it causes. Teams start new projects but do not stop old ones. So people have to manage many different plans at once. Departments work separately. This means customers do not get the help they need. And workers spend hours looking for information. Company language becomes “jargon monoxide.” This makes things unclear and real problems harder to understand.
Sludge often becomes “sticky” over time. People get used to it. They find ways around it. And they stop asking why it is there. This makes feeling frustrated seem normal. It makes teams think problems cannot be avoided. Once sludge takes over, it becomes bad. Time and attention move away from making real value. Good workers lose interest. Progress stops.
And sludge does not stay in one place. It spreads. One new rule leads to another. A confusing process creates a “solution team.” Old tools lead to new training. Instead of just replacing the tools. Sludge creates more sludge.
Teams work best when there are few problems and things are clear. Naming sludge – and seeing it as a real risk to how things work – is the first step to taking it away.
Blink 2 – Too many demands create work that drains focus and energy
Today’s companies have too many things expected of them. What begins as a try to make things better turns into many projects that do not connect. A good example is when the German military tried to use more digital tools. Many plans that overlapped, constant changes in bosses, and many experts coming in made things unsettled. Everyone spoke about new ideas. But soldiers still found it hard to get simple tools, like good internet. This lesson is true for any workplace: when there are more ideas than you can handle, things become messy and progress stops.
This happens because companies face too many demands at the same time. A hospital is not just expected to care for sick people. It must also care about the local area, be good for the environment, try new things, and save money. A school is not just meant to teach. It must also help students feel good, use digital tools, fight unfairness, and make parents happy. A bank must be fair, use new tech, avoid risks, and focus on its customers. It also has to manage people’s money. The result is many goals that often go against each other.
When bosses try to meet every demand, they invite many “solutions” from sellers, experts, and people inside the company. The company becomes like a buffet with endless plans to make things better. Teams feel forced to join these plans. But without clear limits, the amount of work gets very big. And the main goal becomes less clear.
Over time, having too much to do makes the workplace feel strange. Workers move between small projects that are not really part of their main job. Ways of working become more complicated. People who use the company’s services – like customers, students, or patients – notice the quality gets worse. Trust goes down. More people complain. Bosses try to make the company look better. Or they add more rules. This just creates more sludge.
Sludge is tricky because it hides in complex things. When it is hard to measure how well work is done, or when results come slowly, it is easy to miss why things are not good. Teams might think they need more rules or clearer ways of working. This makes the problem worse. Bad results lead to more solutions. And these solutions create more problems.
The main idea is simple but strong: focus is better than rush. Stop your company from taking on every idea you hear. Have fewer projects going on at the same time. Plan for steady work over a long time, not just short bursts of energy. Clear goals allow people to do their best work. And they stop sludge from taking control.
Blink 3 – Small moves help teams stay sane in overloaded workplaces
When work becomes unclear, people quietly find ways to deal with it. Teams rarely speak about these methods. But they use them daily to save their time, energy, and focus.
One common method is simply to avoid things. People stay away from anything that wastes time. Someone might quickly read emails about new plans. Or they might avoid meetings full of complex words. Others avoid slow company systems. They use their own laptops or apps because these work faster. These are not acts of protest. They are ways to protect themselves. They help people stay focused on their main work. It’s the same for “initiative ducking.” This is when workers wait to see if a new project really continues after the first excitement. If it stops, they have saved hours of useless work.
When you cannot avoid sludge, people give it to others. Senior bosses give office tasks to people below them. They do this because they have the power. Co-workers sometimes pass tasks to another team. This team might have more staff or simply cannot say no. Main workers might pass tasks to their bosses. This is often because they do not have the time or information to do them. More and more, people give sludge tasks to technology. AI is already used to create normal reports, fill out forms. and write standard emails. This reduces the mental effort of tasks that are not very important.
Another common method is to follow just enough to meet demands. But without actually changing anything. Managers go to planning meetings. They repeat popular words. Then they go back to working as they did before. Departments release fancy reports full of big ideas. But these ideas never lead to real decisions. Just looking like you are following rules gives you freedom. People can show more or less interest based on the pressure they feel. However, this takes energy. And it can accidentally create more slow, complex systems.
Choosing which rules to follow is another way to survive sludge. People choose the important rules. They quietly ignore the others. Project managers might focus on three steps that inspectors check. Not the ten steps written in the manual. Good bosses teach new people these unwritten rules. This helps the team work well, even with too many complex things.
Sometimes people use “pre-emptive sludging” to take action first. They make their own rules, checks, or approval systems. This blocks demands that are not useful or too difficult. For example, a group of professionals might promote their own rules of conduct. This stops bosses from adding more training on values. By setting the rules first, they stop worse rules from coming later.
These methods show how people survive when there is too much work. They are practical, often done together. And they are made to keep daily work going. But there must be a better way.
Blink 4 – Removing wasteful work creates space for real progress
Teams everywhere know how it feels to see useful time disappear. It goes into forms, data screens, reports, and meetings that do not change much. In many hospitals, staff spend much of their work time writing down information. Sometimes more than a hundred details for each patient. These details started as good safety checks. But over time, they became a huge amount of office work. This takes time away from truly caring for patients.
Some intensive care units in the Netherlands tried to remove “sludge” from their work. They cut their list of needed details from 122 to 67, and then to 17. The results were amazing. Time spent on office work dropped by half. Staff felt better and less tired. Patient results stayed the same. This experiment shows what happens when companies reduce pointless tasks: people can go back to doing work that is important.
De-sludging means taking away tasks that are not very useful. This includes collecting data you don’t need, too many reports, regular meetings with no clear goal, or endless messages that fill your schedule. When this mess is gone, teams find energy and focus they did not know they still had.
De-sludging works best when you deal with it in three ways. The first way is the “beginning of the pipe.” This looks at what is added to the system. Teams often accept new rules without asking why they are needed. A clever step is to add filters. For example, a team could ask that new projects include a one-page paper. This paper should explain their goal and what good they will do. If no one can explain it clearly, the project does not start.
The next stage is the “in pipe” work. This is about fixing things that block progress. Many companies act as if their ways of working cannot be changed. Even when they no longer make sense. Here, teams can do simple checks. Which approvals make things slow? Which systems make the same work happen twice? Which meetings make no choices?
The last stage is “end of pipe” work. This keeps people who rely on the company safe from sludge that still happens. Sometimes a company cannot remove all office work. But it can stop the mess from affecting customers or clients. A school might put all rule-following reports in one place. This way, teachers spend more time with students. A company might use machines to handle claims. So customers never see how complex it is in the background.
These changes work only if bosses change their way of thinking. Managing is also like plumbing. It means finding leaks, clearing things that block flow, and taking away pipes that are no longer useful. Good de-sludging comes from small, steady steps. These steps allow time to think. They allow honesty about choices. And they give teams freedom to take away tasks that are not very useful. When many people join in, work becomes easier and results get better.
Blink 5 – Subtraction is often more powerful than addition
Many workplaces believe that progress means always adding more things. New apps, new rules, new jobs, and new plans to improve things appear every year. Every new thing promises to make life easier. But teams often feel it makes things harder. Daily tasks become messy. What is expected grows. And people spend more time dealing with complex things than doing real work. Institutional minimalism goes against this habit. It asks a question most teams rarely think about: what really should stay?
Complex things do not affect everyone in the same way. People with power or money can avoid slow systems. They hire help, get approvals quickly, or use their contacts to make things easier. Others do not have this ease. A junior worker has to follow every step, every time. A temporary worker has no easy ways around rules. They feel every extra form, system, or demand more strongly. Institutional minimalism makes the work easier from the start. It does not expect people to find ways around problems.
This way of thinking starts with a change in how we naturally react. When something goes wrong, teams first ask: would taking something away solve the problem faster? Instead of adding a new rule or tool. A clinic might stop asking the same questions twice. Instead of adding a new step to sort patients. A shop might stop a weekly report that no one reads. Instead of changing it again. The idea is simple: take things away, don’t just add more.
Companies that use this idea avoid doing “everything everywhere.” It’s a common way things happen: goals get bigger, duties grow, and new expert jobs appear for every new idea. From the outside, it looks busy and active. Inside, it makes people too busy. Institutional minimalism brings attention back to a few main tasks. When teams know what is truly important, making choices becomes easier.
This change is not just about how things are set up. It also depends on how people act every day. Anyone can help keep things simple. Someone might stop a project from getting too many rules that are not needed. Someone else might clean up a way of working that has become messy. Others might politely question ideas that create extra work with no clear good reason. These small actions stop things from becoming messy in the first place.
A simple approach does not mean avoiding duties or stopping improvements. It means not always trying to fix every problem by adding more things. When teams learn what is truly important and let go of the rest, work becomes kinder and more useful. Projects become smaller and easier to handle. Main tasks become important again. And companies find that taking things away carefully often leads to more progress than always adding more.
Final summary
In this Blink about The Art of Less by Mats Alvesson and André Spicer, you have learned that sludge makes teams slow. It takes away their focus. And it moves people away from important work. Clear goals help companies stay stable and avoid having too much to do. Small, clever actions help people save their time. They also help them deal with confusing systems. Taking away tasks that are not very useful gives people more energy. It also improves results without making quality worse. Taking things away makes things clearer. It cuts down complex things from where they start.
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Source: https://www.blinkist.com/https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/the-art-of-less-en