The Start-Stop-More-Less Life Audit
Beat addition bias by crossing out two boxes and only subtracting
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 83%
The audit is a deliberate counter to 'addition bias', the tendency to solve every problem by adding something: another VA, another report, another product. Cook takes a blank page, draws a cross to make four boxes labelled Start, Stop, More and Less, then violently crosses out Start and More, because those are exactly what addition bias wants you to fill. The whole exercise lives in Stop and Less. You scan how your week is actually spent, hunting for the habits, platforms and products that are only sixes and sevens out of ten, the things that neither light you up nor move the needle, then you remove them. The freed time and headspace get repurposed into fewer, better things that compound. Counterintuitively, dropping the mediocre activities usually grows the ones you double down on, and even the things you dropped.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal. Cook runs this audit on a blank sheet whenever she feels 'a little bit out of kilter', framing it explicitly as a fix for addition bias, and cited stopping everything but her Forbes column to illustrate the payoff.
Core principles
- 01The default instinct under pressure is to add; the leverage is in subtracting
- 02Everything working 'a little bit' is exactly what keeps you diffuse
- 03Free space is the raw material for finding your tens
- 04Less but better lets your best activities compound
- 05Doubling down on one thing tends to grow the others too
How to run it
- 1
Draw the four boxes
On a blank page draw one vertical and one horizontal line and label the quadrants Start, Stop, More and Less.
- 2
Cross out Start and More
Deliberately eliminate the two addition boxes so you can't reach for adding anything.
Pro tip Do it 'violently'; the physical act of crossing out reframes your instinct.
- 3
Audit your week
In Stop and Less, list how you're actually filling your time, including unquestioned habits.
Pro tip Watch for things that suited a previous version of you but not the current one.
- 4
Identify the sixes and sevens
Mark the activities that don't light you up or genuinely move the needle, even if they 'work a little bit'.
Watch out The hardest part is admitting a comfortable revenue source is actually a six or seven.
- 5
Remove and protect the space
Cut the flagged items and guard the freed time for fewer, better things.
Pro tip Repurpose the space into what you're doubling down on, not new obligations.
In the wild
Cook stopped logging into Twitter and Instagram and poured everything into her Forbes column, which funnels readers to Coach Fox AI. Over five years the column earned five million paid views, but one million came in the single month after she cut everything else, and her neglected LinkedIn grew more than ever as a knock-on effect.
→ A fivefold monthly spike from subtracting, plus compounding growth on the channels she dropped.
Applying the same subtraction logic, Ali cancelled the live cohort version of his YouTuber Academy after two and a half years, despite it being 'too much money to let go of'. He kept it as a passive evergreen product, accepting lower revenue in exchange for reclaiming roughly three months of his year.
→ Three months of life freed up, judged a price worth paying.
Common mistakes
Secretly filling Start and More
Letting the addition boxes creep back in defeats the exercise; the discipline is that the audit is subtraction-only.
Protecting every 'it works a bit' channel
Keeping activities because they each supply 10% of results guarantees you stay diffuse and never reach the tens.
Is it for you?
Best for
High-performers spread across too many projects who want to reclaim focus and time.
Not ideal for
Someone genuinely under-committed who actually needs to start more, not less.
From the transcript
“there's one called addition bias and it's where whenever you're faced with like a problem or a challenge the tendency is just to add stuff”
“it's a blank piece of paper and there's a vertical line and there's a horizontal line and it just says start stop more less”
From the episode
Stop Wasting Your Life: A Guide To Unlocking Your Full Potential I Entrepreneur Jodie Cook