Save this story Save Story Save this story It’s no secret that between work, family responsibilities, and the stress of living in a country with little in the way of a social safety net, many Americans— especially mothers —feel maxed out. In 2026, the concept of “doing it all” isn’t heroic or aspirational; it’s simply surviving.
When author Priyanka Mattoo took stock of her busy life in Los Angeles—as a mother of two and the eldest daughter of Kashmiri immigrants—she considered what would happen if she stopped instinctively meeting the needs of everyone around her. The result of that private experiment is her new book How to Be Less Useful: The Joy of Inefficiency , a delightful and useful account of trading compulsive productivity for (gasp) fun. It reads like a gentle yet firm pep talk to stressed-out overachievers everywhere.
Vogue spoke to Mattoo about the lessons she learned from writing her first memoir in 2024, resisting the urge to peel her kids’ oranges, and taking inspiration from Jenny Odell and Nigella Lawson .
Vogue : How did writing this book compare to the process with your first memoir, Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones ?
Priyanka Mattoo: I enjoyed it so much more. With the memoir, I felt like I was lancing a boil that had been building for 40 years. I really wanted to write a book for my community and my family, and so the stakes of that, the burden of it, felt really heavy. I had to process a lot of intergenerational trauma for that book to get written the way that I wanted to write it. I was writing about not only a lifetime but generations of lifetimes, because I went back to talking about my grandparents and my great-grandparents. So that was a heavy lift emotionally. This book builds upon the work that I did during the first book, because the process of self-discovery and the therapy that I had to do to get through the first book allowed me to be sort of lighter and gentler with myself. I took two years to write it, but the events of it occur over about a year. What I felt was that in the first book, I processed a lifetime of adverse events, and then in this book, I got to process everything in real time.
What was the hardest part of the beginning of your journey to “be less useful”?
It’s the question of: What’s going to happen if I stop doing everything? Is everything going to fall apart? And you really don’t know until you try it. What I found was that much less fell apart than I thought would. I was clearly working with a very anxious brain and constantly thinking of the worst-case scenario. In the gap that I left, everyone was able to fill most of it. Everyone around me was just like, “Oh, you’re not going to peel my orange? I’ll peel my own orange. That’s fine.”
What do you think some of the biggest structural barriers are to women—mothers in particular—taking time for themselves?
Oh, there are so many systemic problems. I mean, this book only exists because of the patriarchy. I’m describing traditional gender roles that I saw from my own parents, and my parents saw them from their parents. My husband, while incredibly well-meaning, was not conditioned to address domestic duties in the same way that I was. So this is the soup that we’re all coming up in. I say many times in the book that I have immense privilege. Not just financial, but also the time and energy to even think about this stuff. I am an upper-middle-class woman with an expensive education, and those are ways in which I have benefited. Parts of being a working mom are hard even for me, but lots of women are dealing with so much worse. The support that I pay for—a babysitter sometimes, a really good education—I wish everyone had access to that because that, to me, is just the foundation that we should all be handed in a healthy society. I am able to have the life that I have because we make enough money to pay for the things that everyone should have.
How do you redirect the impulse to do things for your kids that they can do themselves?
It’s such a process—first of self-awareness and understanding when you’re jumping in to solve someone else’s problems even when they should do it, and then realizing that your over-functioning causes deficits in other people’s skill development. I’m not just talking about my kids; I’m talking about my parents and my sibling and everyone in my life. I had over-functioned on every front, and once I pulled back and recognized the impulse to jump in and help, which happens to me a thousand times a day, I learned to quiet it and then see what happened. Once I started quieting it, which was very uncomfortable, and waiting to see what happened, which is also very uncomfortable, I was so pleasantly surprised. I learned I had been so arrogant and so controlling that, of course, everyone around me now actually wants to hang out with me instead of that eldest-daughter meme of “Oh God, here she comes.” I still think there’s a little streak of that, but I think I’m much more pleasant to be around.
Everyone I know does too much. It’s just kind of the nature of a coastal, high-achieving milieu, right? When I first handed in the book and we were talking about who I wanted to blurb it, she does so much, so I feel crazy even bringing her up, but as far as an aspirational lifestyle icon: Nigella Lawson.
She was one of them, and then on the other end is Jenny Odell, who wrote How to Do Nothing . I read it right when it came out and was like, I need to start rethinking my relationship to time . That is probably really where the seed for this book started. Nigella and Jenny Odell are both women who do a lot, but they seem to enjoy and appreciate what they’re doing.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
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Source: Lifestyle
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