This TikToker's "5 Things I Stopped Doing" List Is the Permission Slip You Needed

A TikTok creator known as @makeiteasieractually posted a video on September 16 captioned“5 things I stopped doing to make life easier,”and it has since pulled in over 16,900 likes and hundreds of comments. The list isn’t about productivity hacks or five a.m. routines. It’s about quitting the stuff that was quietly draining her, like folding clothes into cupboards instead of using a rack, and keeping duplicates of frequently lost items like sunscreen and phone chargers.

She also swapped fresh prep for convenience, going with pre-chopped vegetables and microwaveable rice, and traded rigid wellness routines for a simple, varied routine that actually fits her. The mindset shift tied it all together: she stopped assuming the harder version of a task was automatically the“proper”one. As she put it,“Why was I making everything so hard?”She added that she had finally begun to work with the person she actually was rather than the person she believed she had to be.

Commenters responded with their own simplifying swaps, from owning multiple pairs of glasses to giving up ironing and matching socks altogether. The takeaway isn’t that shortcuts are lazy. It’s that ease is allowed, and the version of a task that actually gets done beats the perfect one that never happens.

What’s the one task you’ve quietly decided to stop doing the hard way? Tell us in the comments.