We’re constantly trying to do too much and to be all things to all people. Yet when someone makes a request, we say yes without thinking in order to avoid conflict or hurt feelings. We feel we have to do it all.
Because we’re stretched thin and going in too many directions, we make little progress. We feel overworked but underutilized because most of what we’re spending our time on isn’t really important. As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, puts it, many of us are majoring in minor activities. The way out of this trap is to practice essentialism: “do less but better.”
Essentialism is defined as the consistent and focused pursuit of less but better. It’s not about being more efficient or doing more with less (or less with less), as many companies demand of employees. It requires stopping regularly to ask yourself whether you’re spending your time and resources on the right things.
We have numerous opportunities to choose from, and obviously we can’t invest our time and energy in all of them. Some may be good or excellent, but most are unimportant; few are crucial or essential. Essentialism means differentiating among the options and selecting just a few essential ones while eliminating the rest. It’s doing the right things as opposed to doing more things.
Taking an essentialist approach is similar to how you or a professional organizer would streamline your closet. If you neglect your closet, it gets disorganized and crammed with items you don’t wear. You purge it periodically when it gets totally out of control. But if you don’t have an ongoing system that you stick to, you’ll keep ending up back at square one, with a messy closet.
The same thing happens to your life. With good intentions, you say yes to too many things without a sense of overall purpose and your schedule soon overflows. Many activities are ongoing and unless you have a system for purging them, they expand to fill your time automatically.
Essentialism is investing your time and energy only in what’s essential in order to make your optimum contribution to the things that matter most to you.
Before you start eliminating things, you must decide your intent or purpose, the highest contribution you’re trying to achieve that’s distinct from the many nonessential options and opportunities you could pursue. It should be specific and measurable. Ask yourself: What inspires me? What am I really good at? What would make the world better?
Deciding your purpose makes many further decisions unnecessary or makes them easier. For instance, deciding on a specific profession like law or medicine eliminates myriad options and sets a future course. Once a critical decision is made, subsequent choices fall into alignment while other options become moot.
An essentialist approach to your closet — or your life — consists of three phases, in which you consider tough questions:
1) Explore options: When sorting items in a closet, you’d typically ask yourself whether you might wear an item someday. But an essentialist asks a tougher question: Is this item a favorite that I wear often? If the answer’s no, toss it. In your life, the key question is, is this activity essential to making my optimum contribution?
2) Eliminate nonessentials: You have trouble getting rid of things because of sunk-cost bias. This means you place a greater value than they’re worth on things you own because you’ve invested in them, so you’re reluctant to get rid of them. To circumvent this bias, ask yourself what you’d be willing to pay for the item if you didn’t already own it. This may be the reality check you need to realize the item’s true worth. Regarding an activity, the question could be, “if it hadn’t just popped up, would I go out of my way to seek out this activity?” If the answer is no, it’s probably not an “essential” activity. Not only must you sort out the nonessentials, whether possessions or activities, you also must actively eliminate them.
3) Execute routinely: For your closet to stay organized, you need a maintenance system that’s automatic. In your life, once you’ve decided what things to pursue (those that enable you to make your highest level contribution), you need a system to make doing the important things simple and routine.
One of the most crucial skills for practicing essentialism is saying no. If you can’t say no to the nonessential, you won’t have the time and energy to pursue the truly important things.
Saying no makes us uncomfortable because it’s socially awkward. There seem to be only two options: say no and endure the immediate awkwardness, or say yes and regret it much longer. However, you can learn to say no gracefully and even get people to respect you for it in the process.
Some key principles are:
Since essentialists say no a lot, it helps to have a repertoire of ways to do it. Here are a few to start with:
1) Employ the pregnant pause: When someone makes a request, pause and wait for them to fill the silence, or just wait a few beats before saying no.
2) Make the rejection gentle: Say “No, but…” For instance, “I’d love to but I have other plans; let’s try it next month.”
3) Buy some time: Saying something like, “I’ll check my calendar and get back to you,” gives you time to think and ultimately reply that you’re unavailable. Just remember not to use this as as a noncommittal response — use it only if you genuinely have to think about it.
4) Use email auto-responses: Many people are accustomed to receiving email auto-responses when others are on vacation or holidays. You can use them more broadly. Indicate that you’re tied up with a project and temporarily unavailable.
5) Suggest someone else: If you know of someone else who might want to help, convey your regrets while suggesting another name.
At the end of life, many people express the wish that they’d had the courage to live on their own terms rather than trying so hard to meet the expectations of others. However, you can be true to yourself,focusing on what’s important to you, by saying no to nonessentials, not randomly, but intentionally as part of an overall strategy. It takes determination and practice, but you can resist business and social pressures to be all things to all people by learning to focus on what’s essential by eliminating everything else.
We feel constantly pressed for time. We’re trying to do too much, yet when someone makes a request we say yes without thinking, in order to please them or avoid resentment. We feel that we must do it all.
As a result, we’re stretched too thin, we’re going in too many directions, and we’re making only minuscule forward progress on our many tasks and projects. We’re busy but not necessarily productive. We feel overworked but underutilized, because we’re spending much of our time on things that matter little.
As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, puts it, many of us are majoring in minor activities. The way out of this trap is to practice “the way of the essentialist”: do less but better. Dieter Rams, a retired academic and industrial designer, coined the phrase and wrote a book in 1994 with that title. McKeown focuses his book on how to put it into practice, changing your thinking and your life.
Essentialism is the consistent and focused pursuit of less but better, in all aspects of your life. It’s not about being more efficient or doing more with less (or less with less), as many companies demand of employees. It requires stopping regularly to ask yourself, “Am I spending my time and resources on the right things?”
We have numerous activities and opportunities to choose from, and obviously we can’t invest our time and energy in all of them. Some may be good or excellent opportunities, but most are inconsequential; few are crucial or essential. Essentialism is differentiating among the options and selecting and acting on just a few essential ones while eliminating the rest. It’s doing the right things as opposed to doing more things.
Essentialism is investing your time and energy only in what’s essential in order to make your optimum contribution to activities and projects that really matter. Here’s how essentialism compares to the way most people function (nonessentialism):
Results: You do outstanding work, get the right things done, and feel in control and energized.
Nonessentialism: All Things to All People
Results: You do too many things, none of them well; you feel out of control, overwhelmed, and exhausted.
Circumstances and people around us conspire against any efforts to choose and do the few most important things well. This book explains how to push back and put the “way of the essentialist” into practice in the workplace and in life.
Two examples illustrate the divergent paths of the essentialist and nonessentialist.
Example One: Opting Out of the Insanity
Sam Elliot (a fictional name) is a busy Silicon Valley executive who said yes to everything his bosses and colleagues asked of him and soon found himself being run ragged. Not only that, he became increasingly dissatisfied with his work, feeling that he spent most of his time on things that didn’t move the needle. His performance slipped and he seriously considered quitting and becoming a consultant until a mentor advised him to just do the things he would do as a consultant and nothing else.
He began gauging requests by whether he had the time and resources to fulfill them, and he started to say no. When people seemed to respect that, he tightened his criteria even more by considering whether the request was the most important thing he could do with his time at that moment. He stopped attending many meetings and got involved in fewer email debates. He concentrated instead on a few high-value projects. His momentum and quality of work grew, along with his satisfaction. His performance ratings went up and he received a large bonus.
Example Two: Choosing the Trivial Over the Important
By contrast, author McKeown said yes to business demands when he should have said no.
While at the hospital with his wife, who had given birth to their daughter the day before, he found himself answering emails and calls from work. A colleague requested that he come to a client meeting, and he left his wife and newborn to attend, thinking the client would respect him for his sacrifice. But he felt terrible about it and the client seemed to think less of him for leaving his family. The meeting turned out to be unimportant. The key lesson he learned: if you don’t set priorities for your life, others will inject their own.
Why are so many smart people consumed by the pressures around them? What keeps people grinding their wheels instead of doing the most important thing they can do to the absolute best of their ability?
To start with, we’re rewarded for saying yes to everything (nonproductive behavior) and punished for saying no (productive behavior). Successful people are caught in a conundrum. It develops like this:
Thus, pursuing success, if done in an indiscriminate way, can end in failure. Pursuing too many goals can distract us from focusing on the important things.
In his 2009 book How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins examined why celebrated companies collapsed. He found that succumbing to “the undisciplined pursuit of more” was a key factor for many failures. Nonessentialism burns out both companies and people.
There are several reasons we’re prone to failing this way.
There are too many options. Because of our ever-expanding choices, we can’t distinguish the most important ones. More people having more choices represents a major change in the human condition — one for which our society isn’t prepared. We’re unable to manage the overwhelming number of choices by sorting the important from the trivial. We suffer “decision fatigue,” which results in poor choices.
Social pressure keeps increasing. In addition to having a plethora of choices, we’re also under increasing pressure to make certain choices. Social media enable others to constantly weigh in on what we’re doing. We have both information and opinion overload.
We believe we can have and do everything. The idea of “having it all” has been around for a while and is pervasive in advertising, job descriptions with huge lists of required skills and experience, and university applications requiring myriad extracurricular activities. The idea that we can and should have it all is creating more stress as our options have multiplied and we keep stuffing more into our schedules.Companies contribute to the problem, espousing a work/life balance while expecting their employees to be available by phone and email 24/7.
In staff meetings, managers list a dozen “top priorities,” setting employees up for frustration and failure. Originally, in the 1400s, there was no plural form of the word “priority.” “Priority” meant the first or prior thing. We pluralized the word in the 1900s, insisting we could have many “first” things. Businesses and individuals regularly try to operate on this belief, but when many things are priorities, nothing is.
When we try to do everything, we make tradeoffs we’d never make as an intentional strategy. When we don’t actively choose what to focus on, bosses, colleagues, friends, and others choose for us — and their agendas end up controlling our lives. Soon, what’s meaningful and important to us falls by the wayside.
At the end of life, many people express the wish that they’d had the courage to live on their own terms rather than trying so hard to meet the expectations of others.
You don’t need to suffer this fate yourself. You can be true to yourself, focusing on the things important to you, by saying no to nonessentials. You say no not randomly but intentionally, as part of an overall strategy.
Nonessentials include not only typical time wasters, such as spending time on social media, but also positive and appealing things. It takes determination and practice, but you can resist business and social pressures to be all things to all people by learning to focus on what’s essential and eliminating everything else.
Taking an essentialist approach to your work and life is similar to how you or a professional organizer would streamline your closet. If you neglect your closet, it gets disorganized and crammed with clothes you don’t wear. You purge it periodically when it gets totally out of control. But if you don’t have an ongoing system that you stick to, you’ll keep ending up back at square one, with a disorganized closet, or you’ll discard something and regret it later.
The same thing happens to your life. With good intentions, you say yes to too many things without a sense of overall purpose and your schedule is soon cluttered and overflowing. Many activities are ongoing, and unless you have a system for purging them, they expand to fill your time automatically.
An essentialist approach to your closet — and your life — consists of three phases, in which you consider tough questions:
1) Explore options: While sorting items in a closet, you’d typically ask yourself whether you might wear an item someday. But an essentialist asks a tougher question: Is this a favorite item that I wear often? If the answer’s no, toss it.
In your life, the key question is, is this activity essential to making my highest contribution? Part one of the book helps you determine what activities are essential for you to contribute at the highest level to your goal.
2) Eliminate the nonessentials: You have trouble getting rid of things because of sunk-cost bias. This means you place a greater value than they’re worth on things you own because you’ve invested in them, so you’re reluctant to get rid of them. To circumvent this bias, ask yourself what you’d be willing to pay for the item if you didn’t already own it. This may be the reality check you need to realize the item’s true worth.
Regarding an activity, the question could be, “if it hadn’t just popped up, would I go out of my way to seek out this activity?” If the answer is no, it’s probably not an “essential” activity. Not only must you sort out the nonessentials, whether possessions or activities, but you must also actively eliminate them. Part 2 explains how to eliminate nonessentials from your work and life in a way that garners respect from bosses and colleagues.
3) Execute routinely: For your closet to stay organized, you need a maintenance system that’s automatic, so it stays consistently organized without requiring a Herculean effort every so often. In your life, once you’ve decided what things to pursue (your highest level contribution), you need a system to make doing the important things simple. Part 4 lays out a process for doing that.
While you control what goes into your closet, in life new demands bombard you all the time.
What if every time you opened your closet, you found that people had been adding their own items? That’s what happens at work — you start your day with a plan, and by 10 a.m. you’re already off track. Or, you start the day with a to-do list, and by the end of the day, it’s longer than when you started. Or your quiet weekend gets packed with others’ errands and activities.
Essentialism helps you create a system for keeping your life clutter-free and focused on what’s most important.
There are four parts to the book. The first explains the essentialist mindset, while the next three apply it.
Three principles underlie the essentialist mindset:
Based on these premises, the essentialist applies a method similar to the closet analogy described above, which eventually becomes instinctive. The book explores each step in depth. The steps are:
1) Explore options. The essentialist distinguishes the trivial from the crucial by exploring and assessing a range of options. Essentialists end up exploring more options than nonessentialists, who just commit to everything indiscriminately. The essentialist asks:
2) Eliminate the nonessential. After determining what’s most important, the essentialist eliminates the rest. That means saying no to most things, although you’re programmed to say yes to everything. Resisting social pressure takes courage and discipline. You need to choose — if you give up the right to choose, you’ll be driven in many directions by others’ agendas.
3) Execute routinely. Make the process of executing your plan almost automatic by identifying and removing obstacles. By contrast, most people try to implement plans by force of will.
Living your life based on the principle of less but better changes everything:
Imagine a society where schools replaced busywork with important projects that made a difference to the community or where students thought about their highest contribution. What if companies eliminated pointless meetings and let employees work on their most important projects? What if society stopped telling us to buy more, and stopped celebrating busyness as a sign of importance?
In your own life when you commit yourself to discovering and focusing on the essential, you’re ready to clearly answer the question posed by poet Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Essentialism isn’t a way to do one more thing — it’s a different way to think about and do everything.
We’re constantly pulled toward the flawed logic of nonessentialism: I have to do it. Everything is important. I can do it all. The essentialist replaces these false assumptions with: I will or I won’t do it (it’s my choice). Few things are important. I can do it if it’s important.
An essentialist does three things when faced with options or decisions: chooses, evaluates, and makes trade-offs.
When asked to do something, we often feel stuck, believing we don’t really have a choice. Sometimes we feel we can’t do something, but at the same time we feel we have to do it. When we acquiesce to the wishes of another, we give up our power to choose bit by bit until we’re following someone else’s path.
We usually think of choice as something we have, but it’s not as much something we have or don’t have as it is something we do. When we make a choice, we act. By contrast, options are things, not actions. We don’t always control our options, but we do control our actions — we can choose or reject those options. When we get overwhelmed by our circumstances, we often forget our ability to choose. Psychologists call this learned helplessness.
A study using dogs showed how learned helplessness works. Dogs were divided into three groups — dogs in one group wore harnesses that delivered a shock, but they were given a lever to stop the shocks; dogs in the second group wore the same harness, but were given a lever that didn’t work; the third group wore a harness but didn’t receive shocks.
Later, the dogs were placed in a box with a dividing line, where one side produced a shock and the other didn’t. The dogs that had learned they could stop a shock by pushing a lever quickly learned they could go to the other side of the box and avoid shocks. But the dogs that had been powerless (their levers hadn’t worked) didn’t learn to move to the shock-free side. They didn’t know they had any other choice — they developed learned helplessness.
Humans also develop learned helplessness. For example, a child who struggles with math at a young age may give up, believing he can’t get better. In organizations, when people believe their efforts are futile, they stop trying. Or, because they don’t feel they have a choice of what tasks to take on, they try to do it all
Choices are difficult. They involve saying no (if you say yes to everything, you’re not making a choice), and when you say no, you may feel like you’re giving up or losing something.
Our social structures are designed to make it hard for us to say no — for instance, advertising pressures manipulate us to buy (say yes); at restaurants, the server doesn’t just ask whether we want anything else — she brings a dessert tray to our table and describes each option. Political ads try to make it seem disastrous to vote for the other side. Saying no is hardest with the people closest to us. We often feel we have the least choice when a family member wants us to do something.
While nonessentialists often forget their ability to choose, essentialists function with a heightened awareness of choice. In fact, choice is a power you possess, independent of outside forces. The first and most crucial skill of an essentialist is developing your ability to make choices in all areas of your life.
Most people exhaust themselves trying to do everything because they believe everything is important. However, the opposite is true — almost everything is unimportant. If you don’t sort out which is which and focus on the important, you’re doomed to stress and misery.
Many of us are like Boxer the horse in George Orwell’s book Animal Farm. For every setback, Boxer’s answer was, “I will work harder.” He worked harder and harder until he exhausted himself and was sent to slaughter.
Hard work is important, but more effort doesn’t guarantee better results. Nonetheless, we often work longer and harder in our jobs like Boxer the horse, taking on every challenge. We’re taught as children that hard work is key to achievement and we’re rewarded for our efforts. Yet, there’s a point where doing more doesn’t produce more — results plateau or decline. In contrast, doing less — being smarter and more selective about what we do — can produce better results.
The author learned as a boy that some types of effort generate greater rewards than others. Compared to what he earned delivering newspapers, he realized he could make more money in less time by washing neighbors’ cars. Later, in a customer service job, he also benefited himself and the company by putting his time spent taking complaints to better use. He determined that the most valuable result he could achieve was winning back customers who wanted to cancel the company’s service. So he focused on that, and was paid more for each client he retained — he earned more and contributed more.
Doing less but better is more productive than doing more, although it seems counterintuitive given the way we were raised. Yet the argument for doing less dates back to the 1790s, when the Pareto Principle was introduced. It held that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of our results; therefore, the majority of our efforts are wasted.
In 1951, Joseph Moses Juran, a father of the quality movement, expanded on this idea with his Law of the Vital Few. He argued you could substantially improve a product’s quality by resolving a small number of crucial production problems. He applied the idea in Japan, which had a reputation for producing poor-quality goods. Japanese companies began putting their greatest effort into improving a few critical things. The emphasis on quality spread and eventually helped Japan become a global economic power.
You can distinguish the few most important things (the vital few) from the many unimportant things in almost any situation. For instance, Warren Buffett applied the principle to making investments. Instead of trying to make hundreds of good investment decisions, he invested heavily in only a few businesses that he was confident in. He said no to many good investments in order to focus on a few great ones and it paid off — one of his biographers reported that 90% of his wealth came from only 10 investments.
In evaluating options, remember that almost everything is worthless and only a tiny number of things are extremely valuable. As author and leadership consultant John Maxwell put it, “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”
To be an essentialist, you need to start looking aggressively for the vital few and eliminating the many; say no to good opportunities and yes to great ones. Invest time in exploring and evaluating all options; the time invested will more than pay off when you choose the most important things. Evaluate more so you can do less.
Many capable people don’t reach their optimum contribution level because they cling to the belief that everything is important. To practice the skill of identifying the vital few, start by applying it to everyday decisions. When it’s second nature, apply it to bigger things.
Trade-offs are difficult because by definition they involve choosing between two things we want — for instance, more pay or vacation time, getting caught up on the latest email influx or getting to a meeting on time, doing something faster or doing it better. When faced with a choice between two things we want, we often try to answer yes to both, but the reality is that we can’t have it all or do it all. Saying yes to something precludes doing something else.
Our workplaces are full of people who ignore the reality of trade-offs. Some people are always trying to squeeze in one more thing. For example, they agree to produce a report by Friday even though they have another big deadline the same day. They end up missing one or both of their deadlines.
Senior executives are among the worst at accepting the reality of trade-offs. Company mission statements are an example. They list too many priorities and fail to zero in on what the company values most, or what choices employees should make when company values conflict.
By contrast, under Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines made a series of trade-offs as part of a strategy to keep costs down. For instance, rather than fly to every destination, they offered only point-to-point flights. They chose not to serve meals and offered only coach seating. In choosing to provide low-cost service, Kelleher said no to anything that didn’t substantially contribute to that objective.
At first, the approach was criticized, but when profits soared, competitors tried to imitate it. However, they didn’t go the whole way — they kept their existing strategies while also trying to apply the new strategy. By refusing to make trade-offs, they ended up losing huge amounts of money and angering customers. For example, Continental Airlines offered a service called Continental Lite, but because Continental executives clung to their traditional business model, which didn’t allow the price of “lite” flights to be competitive, they lost so much money they had to make unplanned cuts that compromised quality.
The lesson is that ignoring the reality of trade-offs is a poor strategy for companies and for individuals. As happened with Continental Airlines, it can force you to do things by default that you didn’t think through as part of a coherent strategy.
Although painful, trade-offs are an opportunity. When forced to compare options and choose the one that aligns best with your strategy, you increase your chances of getting the results you want. Instead of bemoaning trade-offs, essentialists welcome them as an opportunity to ask, like Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, what do I want to excel at?
Many people don’t reach their optimum contribution level because they believe everything is important. However, only a few things are essential. To practice the skill of identifying the vital few, start by applying it to everyday decisions. When it’s second nature, apply it to bigger things.
Think about the coming weekend. List the things you want to accomplish. Prioritize them.
Choose the “vital few.” What makes them important? What can you eliminate to ensure that you get them done?
Try the same exercise with your daily tasks at work. Make a list and prioritize them.
Which few things contribute the most to your employer’s essential purpose? What can you eliminate to ensure you achieve these things?
How do these few vital things dovetail with your essential purpose for your career and your life?
Essentialists explore and weigh a broad range of options in order to identify the vital few.
While nonessentialists like to jump on the latest opportunity, essentialists take the time to find out what else is out there. Because they’re going to go big on just a few things, they want to make sure they’re choosing the right things.
To discover what’s essential, you need five elements: space to escape and think, time to listen and observe, opportunity to play, time to sleep, and selective criteria for making your choices.
In our do-it-all culture, these things are often seen as unnecessary distractions. For instance, we hear bosses and colleagues say things like, “Fun is a luxury we can’t afford right now.” Or, “We don’t have time for (blank); we have work to do.” Space to explore and think are the antithesis of the thoughtless busyness that surrounds us. But in reality, they’re critical to sorting the important from the trivial matters that swamp us.
Essentialists create space for exploring and pondering options. It can be a physical space, for example, a room that’s conducive to creativity or free from distraction. Or it can be a mental space, a block of thinking time created by eliminating email, phone calls, texts, and other interactions for a certain period.
With our devices and constant connection, we’ve eliminated any chance of being bored, but we’ve also lost the time needed to think and process. Without smartphones and laptop computers, people used to sit around the airport or in the doctor’s office with nothing to do but stare into space and think.
Yet the busier things get, the more we need to build thinking time into our schedules, so that we’re choosing rather than reacting. We need to escape to focus and concentrate. Unlike what some may think, focusing doesn’t mean obsessing about an issue or question; it means exploring countless possibilities.
There are many examples of the benefits of creating space to think:
Whether you invest minutes or hours, it’s important to get away from your day-to-day pressures and think.
Fully exploring options involves more than just gathering information. It requires making sense of that information by noticing connections, piecing together the whole from the parts, and understanding what really matters.
The best journalists do this — they not only report information, they determine what it means and why it matters. Writer Nora Ephron recounted a lesson from a high school journalism teacher. The teacher assigned students to write the lead for a story about a trip by local teachers to a day-long colloquium about teaching methods. A number of famous people were scheduled to participate. The students all began their stories with the facts of the event, especially the notable people attending. However, the teacher pointed out that they had missed the significance for their audience, the students: there would be no school on Thursday. Ephron realized journalism wasn’t just about repeating facts, but also figuring out the point.
You can apply the following skills of journalists to make sense of information.
Journalists try not to get bogged down in minor details but see the bigger picture instead. You can take the same approach in your work and personal life. Look for the lead or the significance. Connect the dots so you can see trends. Step back and look at the issue as a whole.
In 1972, Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed in the Florida Everglades, killing more than 100 passengers. Crash investigators were puzzled at first because they couldn’t find any external contributing factors, such as weather, or any significant mechanical problems. It turned out that the pilots had focused on a malfunctioning nose gear indicator light (the nose gear itself still functioned properly) and didn’t notice until it was too late that the autopilot function had been deactivated. The crew focused on an insignificant thing and missed the bigger problem — the altitude of the plane.
Determining what’s important requires filtering out the unimportant or irrelevant facts, options, and opinions competing for your attention. When meeting with sources, New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman filters out the noise in order to listen for what’s not being said or what’s being said quietly. Nonessentialists half-listen while preparing to say something and miss the point. Or they’re distracted by the loudest voices. Like journalists, essentialists are keen observers and listeners who can see past distractions and inconsequential details and zero in on the significance.
Here are a few additional techniques to further sharpen your ability to filter observations and locate the most essential information:
Play is something we do for the joy of doing it rather than for a specific result — whether it’s flying a kite, creating something, or dancing. It might seem unimportant, but it’s essential in many ways. Play can improve health, relationships, learning, and organizations’ creativity. It stimulates the brain to solve problems.
We weren’t taught how to play as children — we picked it up naturally. But as we got older, we picked up the message that play was a waste of time; we should be working and studying instead. However, play remains important as we grow older. It opens our minds and allows us to explore, come up with new ideas, or reimagine old ones.
Play is integral to essentialism because it enhances exploration. Play helps broaden the range of options available to us by allowing us to see new possibilities and connections. Also, it’s an antidote to stress — stress undercuts productivity and can shut down the creative part of the brain. Play can even improve the executive function of the brain, the part that plans, prioritizes, and analyzes.
“All work and no play” is ingrained in most workplaces. However, a few companies are learning the value of play to spark creativity. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo initiated an improvisational comedy class to stretch people’s minds. Other companies promote play with their physical environments. For example, at Pixar studios, artists’ offices may be decorated as Western saloons or with Star Wars figures. Desk toys spark creativity, although they may seem like trivial distractions to the nonessentialist.
One of the most common ways we undermine our potential is by not sleeping enough; we steal sleep time to work more and fit more activities into our busy schedules. Our nonessentialist culture encourages this thinking by treating sleep as a burden or a waste of time that could be spent more productively.
In fact, research shows that a good night’s sleep makes us more productive, not less. A study of violinists quoted by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers found that the best violinists practiced more than students who were merely good did. But after practice, the next most important factor differentiating the best from the good violinists was sleep. The best averaged 8.6 hours (about an hour longer than the average American). They also napped longer than average. Researchers concluded that with more sleep the top performers were able to practice with greater concentration. So while they practiced more, they also got more out of their practice because they were better rested.
Another researcher likened having a sleep deficit to drinking too much alcohol — he said pulling an all-nighter or sleeping only four or five hours a night for a week creates an impairment equivalent to a blood-alcohol level of 0.1%.
Getting a full night’s sleep, on the other hand, may increase brain power and enhance problem-solving ability, according to a German study. While we sleep, our brains restructure information, creating new neural connections that open the way to new solutions to problems. If we’re running short on sleep, research shows that a nap can boost creativity.
Sleep allows us to function at our optimum level. High achievers like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recognize this. He says eight hours of sleep makes him more alert and energetic all day. Google provides “nap pods” for employees, a message to employees that sleep is a priority.
While some people can survive on fewer hours of sleep, many of them are just used to being tired and have forgotten what being rested feels like. While a nonessentialist thinks one less hour of sleep equals another hour of productivity, the essentialist knows that the opposite is true — one more hour of sleep equals even more hours of much higher productivity.
(Shortform note: for a popular book on the benefits of sleep and tips on how to get better sleep, check out our summary of Why We Sleep.)
To make any decision, you apply criteria, whether you’re conscious of the criteria you’re using or not. Nonessentialists and essentialists treat this process differently. Nonessentialists use implicit and broad criteria when choosing how to spend their time. For example, they think, ”If other people in the company are doing it, I should be doing it.” “When someone asks me for a favor, I should do it.”
Many decisions stem from outside pressure to do what you feel is expected. In the social media era, we’re highly attuned to what others are doing, but trying to keep up is impossible given the infinite number of activities, most of which are nonessential but still time-consuming.
Implicit criteria don’t lead to the best decisions — those that allow you to make your highest contribution — or even to rational choices. But they add to your already full plate. The essentialist answer is to use extremely selective and specific criteria to determine what’s most important. The word extremely is important because, as noted previously, there usually are many good or mid-level options. Essentialists choose only the absolute best.
This is a key essentialism principle, critical to the process of exploring options. The closet-organizing example shows how extreme criteria work. While sorting your clothing, if you base your decisions on a broad standard of whether there’s a chance you’ll wear something at some point in the future, you won’t get rid of much. However, if you apply a more selective standard — “do I really love this?” — you can more easily eliminate the nonessential. You can do the same with other choices in your life.
TED speaker Derek Sivers advises using this test to decide on options — if you feel an absolute, total conviction to do something (if your reaction is, “hell, yes”), then do it. Anything less should get a thumbs-down. He applies it to hiring decisions, often rejecting many good or even excellent candidates to wait for the perfect candidate.
One useful technique for extreme selection is the 90 percent rule. As you consider your options, identify the single most important criterion for deciding. Rate each option between 0-100 percent on that criterion. Reject any option that you rate lower than 90 percent.
This method requires making trade-offs. You’ll have to reject good options and have the discipline to wait for the perfect option. If you use overly broad or vague criteria instead, you’ll end up agonizing over a lot of similar, mid-level options and commit to too many. Applying concrete numbers to your options forces you to make decisions consciously and logically, rather than haphazardly or on the basis of pressure or someone else’s agenda.
Besides keeping you from making the best decisions, having too many or overly broad criteria can frustrate employees. For example, one company had three criteria for deciding what projects to undertake, but over time the standards broadened and blurred to the point that the practical standard was doing anything a customer requested. Team members felt overworked and morale dropped because by doing everything, they lacked a sense of purpose. Further, the company didn’t stand out in its market. But when they got rid of the many mid-level projects and focused on the most interesting and distinctive work, employees felt empowered to make choices and focus on their optimum contributions.
The furniture maker Vitsoe uses stringent criteria in at least two ways. The company offers only one product, the 606 Universal Shelving System, which it excels at producing. Also, its hiring process is highly selective and deliberate. The standard for hiring is whether the candidate will be an absolutely natural fit. Steps include a phone screening, interviews with multiple people in the company, a trial run for a day, more interviews, and maybe an offer. If the team isn’t absolutely sure about a candidate (if she isn’t a clear yes), the answer is no.
Being disciplined and selective is more difficult when it comes to opportunities that pop up unexpectedly, as opposed to the ones we choose to go after. For instance, someone might offer us a side project that would generate easy cash or they ask us for help with a task that we enjoybut that doesn’t pay. The temptation is strong — how can we say no to an appealing project for friend or one that would bring in extra money? By saying no, we might be missing out. We wouldn’t have gone after the project had it not turned up, but it seems easy to say yes. However, opting for the easy reward could well mean having to say no to a more meaningful one. Or it could detract from making our highest contribution to an essential thing.
Here’s a process for applying selective criteria to pop-up opportunities:
If the opportunity doesn’t meet your minimum criteria, you don’t even have to move on to the next step of listing your extreme criteria — the answer is no. If the opportunity passes the first set of criteria but doesn’t meet two of three extreme criteria, reject it.
Applying specific, stringent criteria to decisions is like using a search engine — the more specific you are in defining your search, the more relevant the results you get. For instance, searching Google for a “good restaurant in New York City” would return much less useful results than the more specific “best Indian food in Manhattan.”
You can apply this way of thinking to other searches for options. For instance, if you’re considering a change of career, rather than thinking in general terms about potential good career opportunities, you could ask yourself what you’re passionate about or where your talents could make a significant difference.
In any decision, apply extremely selective criteria to narrow your options to one truly outstanding option, to which you can most enthusiastically say yes.
Remember that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. Learn to focus on what’s essential and what really excites you so you can discard what’s not important.
Make a list of opportunities available to you right now that you need to decide on.
Which of these make you say “hell yes?” Why do they?
What prevents you from saying “no” to the other ones? Write a short explanation for each.
Once you’ve explored your options, the next critical consideration isn’t which one you should say yes to, but which ones you’ll say no to.
Once you know what you want to get rid of, the question is how best to do it. Because we’re bombarded with so many nonessential activities and opportunities, with new ones appearing constantly, we need systematic ways of cutting the excess.
Returning to the closet example, once you’ve sorted the contents (explored the options) and decided which things to get rid of (made choices), you still need to take the actual step of elimination. It’s not easy — you still may be hesitating on a few items.
This chapter suggests ways that make it easier to say no to, or eliminate, nonessential things so you can focus on the vital few. And if you say no the right way, you’ll actually receive greater respect from your colleagues, bosses, and others.
The first category of options to eliminate are those that don’t align with your purpose, that is, with what you want to achieve. Of course, to do this you need to be radically clear about what your purpose is.
A surprising number of people can’t answer the question of what they want to achieve in their career in the next five years. Similarly, many companies don’t or can’t clearly state their purpose or goals. They think a “pretty clear” statement is good enough. However, anyone who’s had an eye exam knows there’s a big difference between lenses that help you see somewhat better and those that provide absolute clarity.
The same kind of difference exists between a fairly clear purpose and a clear one, whether for individuals or companies.
Clarity of purpose consistently predicts how well people will do their jobs. When teams lack absolute clarity about what they’re trying to achieve, their motivation and cooperation lag. People become frustrated and waste time on nonessentials. No amount of training in teamwork and communication will make a team succeed if the members are unclear about their goals and roles.
There are two common outcomes when teams aren’t clear on their purpose: members play politics and everyone pursues his or her own agenda.
Playing politics. Instead making their optimum contribution to the group’s goal, team members vy for the manager’s favor or attention by doing such things as undercutting peers, trying to look important, or echoing whatever the manager says or seems to want. These things are both nonessential and counterproductive.
When we lack clear personal goals and values, we behave similarly, making choices that are political or competitive. For instance, we focus on nonessentials like having a nicer car or living in a nicer area than someone else does. Essential activities, such as family relationships and health, get short shrift.
Everyone for himself. When teams lack purpose, members pursue their own interests. Their pursuits may conflict with other members’ activities. When many people pursue different activities, neither the members nor the team make their optimum contribution and the team’s results fall short. In contrast, when teams are clear about their purpose and members perform at their optimum levels, momentum builds and the whole — the collective contribution — is greater than the sum of the parts.
In personal life, pursuing five majors in college doesn’t result in a degree, and working many different jobs in different fields doesn’t constitute a career track. Just as a team can’t succeed when its members aren’t unified by a shared purpose, individuals can’t succeed when their activities aren’t directed toward a single goal. On teams and in your personal life, you must decide your intent or purpose, the vital thing you’re trying to achieve that’s distinct from the many nonessential options and opportunities you could pursue. It should be specific and measurable.
Deciding your purpose makes many further decisions unnecessary or makes them easier. For instance, deciding on a specific profession like law or medicine eliminates myriad options and sets a future course. Once a critical decision is made, subsequent choices fall into alignment while other options become moot.
When the British prime minister appointed Martha Fox Lane to be the UK’s first “Digital Champion,” she had to establish a purpose. Avoiding a typical vague mission statement, she came up with a clear, measurable intent that motivated and empowered her team: get everyone in the UK online by the end of 2012. Her clear purpose made it easy to separate nonessential from essential activities.
Here are a few guidelines for coming up with a similarly clear purpose for companies and individuals:
Focus on substance over style. When developing mission or purpose statements, it’s tempting to get stuck in debates over wording or succumb to cliches and jargon. Instead, focus on answering the essential question that sets the stage for everything else you do: what’s the one thing you want to be the absolute best at?
Define success: The second key to crafting a clear statement of purpose is answering the question, what will success look like? If you can’t define success in a way that’s measurable, your statement won’t inspire anyone to achieve it. That’s why many grandiose statements (for instance, eliminating world hunger) fail to motivate.
Actor Brad Pitt came up with a concrete and inspirational purpose when he formed an organization to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. It was “to build 150 affordable, green, storm-resistant homes for families living in the Lower 9th Ward.” It answered the question of how the group would know when it had succeeded.
During the 27 years that anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela spent in prison, he honed an essential intent to the exclusion of everythng else, including resentment: eliminating apartheid in South Africa. He not only succeeded but went on to become the country’s first black president.
Most people are reluctant to say no to others. We’re afraid of creating conflict, disappointing someone, angering our boss, or missing an opportunity.
But saying no when it’s aligned with a clear purpose or intent is powerful. For example, when a bus driver demanded that civil rights activist Rosa Parks give up her seat on a segregated bus, she said no. Over the course of attending civil rights meetings, she’d developed a clear purpose: she wouldn’t suffer that kind of humiliation again. That purpose drove her to act.
Of course, you won’t necessarily change history when you say no, but you can make a difference by standing your ground. In fact, by saying no to something nonessential, you’re often saying yes to something far more important.
When self-help author Stephen R. Covey bumped into an old friend after making a presentation in San Francisco, the friend invited Covey and his 12-year-old daughter, who was traveling with him, to dinner. Covey graciously declined because he’d planned activities with his daughter for the rest of the evening. That “no” — with which Covey opted for the essential over the nonessential — gave his daughter the memory of a lifetime.
Saying no in the moment, as Covey did, can be difficult if you’re unclear about what’s essential. Clarity gives you the strength and the rationale to reject what’s unimportant. Covey was certain of his intent to spend the evening with his daughter, while Rosa Parks’ moral clarity gave her strength to remain in her seat on the segregated bus.
Saying no makes us uncomfortable because it’s socially awkward. We prefer to get along with others — conformity and cooperation are traits that helped humans survive in the early days, and they’re still ingrained.
There seem to be only two options: say no and endure the immediate awkwardness or say yes and regret it much longer. However, you can learn to say no gracefully, and even get people to respect you for it in the process.
Since essentialists say no a lot, it helps to have a repertoire of ways to do it. Here are a few to start with:
1) Employ the pregnant pause: When someone makes a request, pause and wait for them to fill the silence, or just wait a few beats before saying no.
2) Use a gentle rejection: Say “No, but…” For instance, “I’d love to but I have other plans; let’s try it next month.”
3) Buy some time: Saying something like, “I’ll check my calendar and get back to you,” gives you time to think and ultimately reply that you’re unavailable.
4) Use email auto-responses: Many people are accustomed to receiving email auto-responses when others are on vacation or holidays. You can use them more broadly. They’re handy because they don’t offend — you aren’t saying you don’t want to reply, just that you can’t right now. Indicate that you’re tied up with a project and temporarily inaccessible.
5) Make them prioritize: When your boss makes a request on top of previous requests, ask which one you should prioritize. Make clear that something else will have to give way.
6) Use humor if it fits the occasion: For instance, if someone asks you to participate in a game or athletic activity, poke fun at your lack of skill.
7) State what you’re willing to do: If someone asks for something and you want to help but can’t do what they asked, state what you can do instead. For instance, “I’m willing to loan you my car, but I can’t drive you to the airport Tuesday.”
8) Suggest someone else: If you know of someone else who might want to help, convey your regrets while suggesting another name.
Being able to say no effectively is a leadership skill you can learn. Start by learning a few basics and practice until you become an expert.
We all find ourselves in situations where we’ve invested in something but it’s not paying off. Still, we don’t want to concede and waste the time, money, or effort we’ve already invested. For example, we sit through a movie we hate because we paid for it or we keep waiting when our doctor or lawyer is late rather than rescheduling the appointment. Similarly, people stay in bad relationships or continue gambling to win their money back.
Companies do the same thing, often suffering huge losses. For instance, although the Concorde jet was the fastest passenger plane in the world, it was a financial failure. It lost money for more than forty years, yet over that time the French and British governments continued to invest in it.
It’s human nature to respond this way — the more you invest (sunk costs), the harder it is to pull the plug on a commitment. However, as an essentialist, you need to say no or “no more” to losing propositions and commitments. Here are some commitment traps to avoid:
To test the value of an ongoing commitment or activity, scale back or stop doing it for a short time to see whether it makes a difference or whether anyone even notices. If there’s no initial reaction, wait a bit longer; if there’s still no reaction, eliminate the activity. An example is the regular reports that managers produce, pulling together data — sometimes their value erodes over time to the point that no one even looks at them.
Of course, getting out of a commitment or investment is harder than not committing to something that’s nonessential in the first place. You feel guilty reneging or going back on your word. But essentialists get comfortable with admitting mistakes and cutting their losses because it’s crucial to making your highest contribution — and they focus on making better choices in the future.
Part 2 discussed how applying the skills of a journalist can help an essentialist explore options and discern what’s significant. Applying another set of journalistic skills — those of an editor — can help you identify and eliminate the nonessential, which in essence is what an editor does.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey of Twitter thinks of his role as being the chief editor of the company.
Because there are many things the company could be doing, he decides which ones to do, then edits out or eliminates the rest.
A good editor, whether in film or in writing, eliminates everything except what needs to be there. Editing is a true essentialist craft. Here are some other ways editing embodies the principles of essentialism:
You can apply four basic principles of editing to the process of editing out the nonessentials in your life.
1) Cut nonessential options. Cutting options is part of decision-making. Part of the word decision in Latin (cis) means to cut. When making decisions, deciding to cut options, especially attractive ones, is difficult. But eventually, each cut brings satisfaction because every second you gain can be applied to something better.
2) Condense. In editing, when you condense writing you’re making it do more with less (fewer words). Every remaining word must now do more work, becoming more important. In life, condensing also allows you to do more with less. You can eliminate many pointless activities and replace them with one meaningful activity. At work, maybe you can skip unimportant meetings so you have more time to prepare for the most important meeting. If you condense your belongings to live in a smaller apartment or house, many items such as furniture can serve more than one purpose. Just as the important words in a text contribute more to the text’s meaning when you edit out the fluff, your actions make greater contributions toward your goal when you cut out the nonessentials.
3) Make corrections. With a sense of the overall purpose of a work, an editor corrects grammar, logic, and facts. Similarly, in your life, compare your activities with your central purpose and make any necessary course corrections.
4) Exercise restraint. The best editors know when to make changes but also when to exercise restraint and leave things alone. In life, leaving things alone or taking a wait-and-see approach can be the wisest course. For instance, you don’t need to be the first to respond to every email thread or to comment at a meeting.
Nonessentialists only edit or cut back when they get overwhelmed. But waiting too long to eliminate nonessential activities and tasks can force you to make drastic cuts that aren’t necessarily what you would prefer. Editing nonessentials from your life thoughtfully and as a matter of routine is more effective.
Boundaries have virtually disappeared in our nonessentialist culture. Technology and interconnectedness have erased the line between work and personal life and work has flowed into personal time. You’re expected to be available to work at all times. Meanwhile, others also make demands on your personal time.
Nonessentialists believe they don’t need boundaries because they can do everything. They see drawing lines between work and personal life as getting in the way of their productivity. But they eventually become spread so thin that they’re no longer productive.
As an essentialist, however, setting boundaries is part of the process of saying no so you can pursue your highest contribution. It’s uncomfortable to set boundaries for work and you can feel like you’re paying a high price for doing so (for instance, undercutting your career). But often, in the long run you’ll garner respect and benefit your career by focusing your limited energy on what’s really important.
The price for not pushing back is that demands will keep encroaching to the point that you won’t have any boundaries at all — and others will set your agenda. The trade-off is that you lose your ability to choose what’s most essential in your life.
Clear boundaries, however, empower and liberate you to pursue your interests. First, they allow you to eliminate nonessential demands. They’re also proactive — they free you from having to say no by preempting future demands because others have learned where your lines are.
Still, there are people who simply don’t recognize boundaries and constantly make demands on your time. Think about how often your weekends are consumed by someone else’s agenda. People who lack boundaries distract you from your purpose and make their problems your problems. Here are some guidelines for dealing with these kinds of people:
With practice, setting and enforcing your limits will become increasingly easier.
Many of us are reluctant to say no to others because we’re afraid of creating conflict. But we need to say no to nonessential activities in order to we say yes to the most important things. The key is saying no gracefully by rejecting the activity, but not the person.
Think of a recent request that you agreed to, but that left you feeling resentful or taken advantage of. Why did you agree in the first place?
What was your trade-off? What more important activity did you have to put off or eliminate to meet the request?
How could you have said no, so that you felt satisfied about doing the right thing without hurting the relationship long term?
What boundary can you set in advance that would help you say no or eliminate the need to say no to this person or this type of request in the future? How would you explain the boundary to others?
There are two ways to execute or implement something. You can get it done by force of effort, or you can accomplish your purpose almost effortlessly because you’ve created a system. Essentialists create a system.
Returning to the closet example, after you cleared and organized your closet, you need a system so that keeping it clutter-free (your ongoing objective) is simple and routine. SImilarly, once you’ve determined what activities and endeavors are helping you achieve your purpose, you need a system for executing them.
When things are easy to do, they’re more likely to get done. This part of the book explains how to make implementation (getting the right things done) as easy and smooth as possible. Steps include creating buffers, removing obstacles, achieving small wins, creating routines, and focusing.
You never know when something unexpected will pop up and threaten to sidetrack your plans. For instance, your flight may be delayed or canceled, or a traffic detour will make you late. At work, a supplier might be late, a colleague might drop the ball, or a client could change his mind at the last minute.
You can wait until something happens and react, or you can prepare by giving yourself a buffer. Buffers are protective zones that keep things from conflicting. An environmental buffer keeps threats such as chemical pollution from a sensitive area.
In your work and personal life, buffers make implementation easier. A time buffer keeps travel delays from throwing you off schedule. Making a list and packing for a trip in advance, rather than at the last minute, reduces the risk you’ll forget something important. Building time for questions into a presentation prevents you from running out of time to make the important points. You can create financial buffers by saving money for emergencies or planning for retirement or illness.
Nonessentialists assume a best-case scenario, even though things always take longer or are more complicated than expected. They’re forced to react to changes at the last minute and results suffer — for instance, they cut corners or turn in an incomplete report. Their execution is forced and they end up feeling stressed.
Here are some tips for smoothing implementation by creating buffers:
Overprepare: Think about what could go wrong and be ready. During the race to the South Pole in 1911, Roald Amundsen prepared for everything — he brought duplicates of critical items, created extra caches of food and supplies for the return trip, and posted extra flags or markers so they could be found in bad weather or from off course. The other team led by Robert Falcon Scott failed to prepare and ended up not having enough food and supplies, and he and his team didn’t survive.
Beware of the planning fallacy: The planning fallacy refers to people’s tendency to underestimate how long a task will take, even when they’ve done it before. To avoid succumbing to the planning fallacy, always add 50% to any time estimate. For instance, if you expect a conference call to take an hour, block off an additional 30 minutes. You’ll feel less stress — sitting in traffic is less stressful when you’ve built in extra time to reach your destination. If you don’t end up needing the extra time, it’s a welcome bonus.
Do risk-management planning: Governments and organizations create risk management strategies. They identify risks, determine who will be exposed and how vulnerable they will be, assess financial impact, and plan how to respond. You can apply the concept to building your own buffers. Consider the worst-case scenario, social and financial impacts, and what you can do to lessen risks and respond. These considerations will suggest buffers, like adding to a project’s budget.
In your work and personal life, you face obstacles that keep you from achieving what matters to you or that slow the process. But by systematically identifying and removing these constraints you can make execution smoother and simpler. You do it, not by trying to fix everything at once, but by starting with the most critical obstacle, where improvement will have the biggest impact.
In The Goal, a management-oriented novel by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, a fictional character, Alex Rogo, is tasked with turning around a failing production plant. He succeeds by focusing on improving the slowest aspect of the production process, which has a ripple effect on improving the whole operation. He learned the value of focusing on the weakest point while leading a Boy Scout hiking trip. The group moved inefficiently, starting and stopping when the faster hikers got ahead and had to wait for slower hikers. When Rogo put the slowest hiker at the front of the group and helped him go faster by removing weight from his pack, the group moved more steadily and quickly.
Similarly, essentialists address obstacles strategically, improving the overall functioning of the system by identifying the weakest point or “slowest hiker.” Thus, they reduce their effort and maximize results. In contrast, nonessentialists act haphazardly, addressing the most immediate or obvious obstacles with only marginal impact or making quick fixes in response to crises.
Here are some steps to identifying and removing obstacles, using the example of preparing a 15-page report for a client:
When you’re trying to achieve something big, it’s tempting to feel you must start big. The nonessentialist approach is to go big on everything, to do it all. The nonessentialist mistakenly believes that the more effort she expends, the more she’ll achieve. But as every employee knows, company initiatives launched with great fanfare don’t always amount to much.
The best way to achieve a big goal is to start chalking up small wins in areas that are essential and celebrate progress. Research shows that the most effective type of motivation is progress.
A small win creates momentum and builds confidence in further success. A popular 1968 Harvard Business Review article reported that people are motivated by achievement and recognition.
As each small win propels you toward the next win, you build momentum until you achieve a significant breakthrough. The progress will seem effortless.
The Richmond Police Department reduced criminal behavior among young people by celebrating small successes. When they “caught” a young person doing something good — wearing a bike helmet, or picking up litter, for instance — police would give them a “ticket” redeemable for a reward, such as a movie pass. The rewards motivated more good behavior.
In your personal life, you can make significant progress toward your goals by building momentum with small wins. For example, the author and his wife wanted to reduce their children’s screen time. Rather than dictating time limits, they gave their children ten tokens each week that could be traded for screen time or money. A child could earn an additional token for spending 30 minutes reading a book, which could also be traded for screen time or money. The children’s screen time dropped 90 percent and reading increased by the same amount. The system of rewarding small changes worked effortlessly, achieved its goals, and the parents saved the time they had spent policing screen time.
Here are some techniques for creating similar effortless systems:
1) Determine your minimal viable step: In conceiving new products, entrepreneurs seek the simplest product a customer will find valuable — the minimal viable product. The idea is to avoid wasting resources on nonessential features. You can apply the principle by determining the smallest amount of progress that will be useful in accomplishing your essential task. The author used this method to explore the viability of writing this book. His minimal viable step was to share an idea on Twitter, and if it resonated, he’d write a blog further developing it. From there, he progressed to writing the book.
2) Apply minimal viable preparation: To accomplish your essential task, start early and start small. Start as soon as possible with the minimal time investment necessary to make progress.
For example, you could invest a small amount of time in a project two weeks before the deadline and it could help you avoid stress later. Think of a task or deadline and consider the minimum you could do now.
3) Visually depict progress: Whether it’s fundraising thermometer charts or star charts for chores at home, kids and adults like to see their progress toward a goal. As a motivator, try keeping visual track of your progress on a project.
When you start small and reward progress, you end up achieving more than when you start big
Establishing a routine is a powerful technique for executing on essential tasks. With a routine, you can execute automatically without expending energy figuring out what’s next. It also helps you counter the pull of nonessential distractions.
Routines make challenging things easier, although the reasons aren’t entirely clear. It may be that as you repeat something, you strengthen neural connections, making it easier for the brain to activate them. For example, it takes several repetitions and applications of a new word before you learn it. Once you’ve activated the same synapses or connections repeatedly you know the word without consciously thinking about it. Similarly, you can eventually make a familiar meal without looking at the recipe or drive the same route routinely without thinking about it.
In the same way, your ability to execute essential tasks gets better with practice, until the tasks become routine. And when you follow a routine, mental space is freed up. You can perform one essential task flawlessly while thinking about another. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg notes the brain can almost shut down when performing a routine, allowing you to focus on something else.
The wrong routines can be boring and stifle creativity. However, the right ones boost creativity by saving mental energy that you can redirect to another essential activity.
One researcher noted how creative people use routines to free up their minds. They learn their most effective patterns for sleeping, eating, and working and stick to them. They wear comfortable clothes and limit their interactions and activities. Freed from external distractions, they can concentrate on their art.
Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps followed the same routine at every race, arriving two hours early, stretching, warming up, and so on, all in a specific order. He had a string of steps and activities mapped out, all the way up to the point when he finally walked to the starting blocks, dried the blocks, flapped his arms, and got into position. He also had a visualization routine of imagining the perfect race, ending with him winning, which he ran through his mind every morning and evening.
According to research, almost 40 percent of our choices are unconscious. The problem is that it’s easy to develop routines that aren’t helpful, like checking email at every traffic light or wasting time on social media. Here are some principles for breaking unproductive patterns and replacing them with routines that make executing the essentials automatic:
1) Change Your Cues
The reason it’s difficult to change a bad habit, such as eating junk food, is that the habit is reinforced by a powerful mental loop consisting of a cue, routine, and a reward.
As Duhigg explains in The Power of Habit, the cue sends your brain into automatic mode and launches the routine or behavior. The behavior generates a reward that reinforces the habit for the future. The loop becomes neurologically set. For instance, seeing a particular doughnut shop on your way to work (the routine) is a cue to stop and get a doughnut (thebehavior), and your enjoyment of the doughnut is the reward reinforcing the behavior for next time.
To change a habit, reassociate the cue that’s triggering the nonessential activity with a different, essential activity. For instance, when you see the doughnut shop on your way to work, use the cue to remind you to buy something healthier from the deli across the street. If your alarm going off in the morning triggers you to check your email, use it as a cue to do something else, such as stretching exercises.
At first, repurposing a cue is difficult, but each time you repeat the new behavior you strengthen the mental link between cue and behavior. Soon the change will become routine.
2) Create new triggers
Besides reassociating old cues with something else, you can create new cues to trigger new routines. For example, the author created a new cue to develop the daily routine of writing in a journal.
For a long time, he’d written only sporadically, and would procrastinate. So he decided to make it less daunting by writing only a few lines at the same time each day. To generate a cue, he started carrying his journal in his bag next to his phone. Whenever he pulls out his phone to charge it each evening (already a habit) he sees the journal, which is his cue to write a few lines. The process has become instinctive and he looks forward to it.
3) Do the hard thing first
Develop a routine of doing your most difficult task the first thing in the morning. Find a cue (something you’re already accustomed to, like your first cup of coffee) to trigger you to focus on it.
4) Have multiple routines
To avoid getting tired of your routines, try having different ones for different days of the week. Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter, divides his week into themes — for instance, Tuesdays are devoted to product development, Wednesdays to marketing, and Fridays to company and culture. Colleagues organize meetings and requests around these routines.
5) Change one routine at a time
Instead of trying to change multiple habits or start several new routines at once, start with one change and build on your progress from there. Starting new routines is challenging but it pays off in energy savings once they become automatic.
It’s easy to get stuck going over past mistakes or to spend time worrying about the future. In both instances, you’re thinking about things you can’t control. An essentialist’s time is better spent thinking about areas where your efforts matter.
Worrying about the past or future distracts you from what’s essential now. The Greeks viewed time in two ways: chronological (the time we measure) and the opportune or right time (now). We only have now. The essentialist focuses on the present and on the things that are truly important right now. Concerns about the past and future cause you to miss the present moment. However, when you focus on the moment, time seems to move more slowly, you’re more relaxed, and better able to concentrate.
Essentialists live in the moment, allowing them to devote their full energy to the essential task at hand.
Former Utah high school rugby coach Larry Gelwix took an essentialist approach — he kept his team focused on the present with the acronym WIN, which stood for “what’s important now?” The question helped players stay focused on what they needed to be doing in the moment, rather than rehashing a previous play or worrying about losing. Because they focused on their game and nothing else, winning became almost automatic. Over Gelwix’s 36 years as a coach, the team had 418 wins, ten losses, and twenty national championships.
He drew a distinction between losing and being beaten — being beaten meant the other team was better; losing meant you lost focus on what was essential in the moment.
Here are some tips for how to be present:
Focusing on being in the moment affects the way you do things — the times you can do this bring you contentment and happiness (for instance focusing on enjoying a cup of tea). Pay attention to moments throughout the day when you focus on being present — think about what triggered them and what brought you out of them. Recognizing the triggers, try to recreate them.
Training yourself to be present will make you happier as well as help you achieve your essential purpose.
You can think of essentialism as something you do occasionally, or as something you are. It can be something you add to your overcommitted life or it can be a different lifestyle, a simpler way of doing everything.
Essentialism is at the heart of many spiritual traditions. For example, Gandhi eliminated everything in his life to focus on a higher purpose: liberation of the oppressed. Buddha found his mission after leaving a life of wealth and privilege. Quakers also commit to a simple life, focusing on the essential.
More recently, successful people including Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett have lived by an essentialist philosophy of less but better. You must choose whether to commit to making essentialism your lifestyle.
In thinking about essentialism (focusing on your highest contribution) and nonessentialism (doing everything all the time), ask yourself which approach is your major and which is your minor. Most people practice aspects of both. The key question is, which one is your core identity?
People with essentialism at their core get much more from their investment than those who apply essentialism occasionally. The benefits are cumulative — essentialism becomes more routine as you repeatedly make essentialist choices. Ultimately, essentialism isn’t only about success — making your highest-level contribution — but also about living a meaningful life.
You have a simple yardstick for each decision or challenge in your life: Is this essential? If you’ve identified what really matters and focused your time and energy on it, you’re not likely to regret your choices.
The reason it’s difficult to change a bad or nonessential habit is that the habit is reinforced by a powerful mental loop consisting of a cue, routine, and a reward.
Think of a nonessential activity that’s become routine for you, but that’s counterproductive. What is the cue that triggers the routine or behavior?
Describe your routine and the reward that reinforces it.
What more important activity can you replace the counterproductive one with?
How can you repurpose the cue to direct you to the new activity and make it routine? What reward will reinforce it?
You never know when something unexpected will pop up and threaten to sidetrack your pursuit of what’s essential. You can wait until something happens and react or you can take the essentialist approach and prepare by giving yourself a buffer.
Think of an upcoming personal activity — for instance, a vacation or business trip, a home improvement project, or a major purchase. What potential challenges might you encounter?
What kind of buffer could you create to make the activity go smoothly? How could you create that buffer?
Now think of an important work project and approach it as a risk management strategist might. Ask: What are the risks, what is the worst-case scenario, and what might the impacts be (human and financial)?
In your general life, what kind of buffer or buffers would reduce your risks and make you more resilient to setbacks?
In your work and personal life, you face obstacles that keep you from achieving what matters to you or that slow the process. By identifying and removing them you can make execution smoother and simpler.
Think of an essential task or project in your work or personal life that you’re having trouble executing. List what you think the obstacles are.
Now prioritize the obstacles.
Finally, decide which obstacle’s removal would have the greatest impact. (which one’s removal would make other obstacles fall away and create momentum?)
If you lead people in an organization or business, you can apply essentialist skills and thinking to your leadership. Here’s a review of how traditional and essentialist leaders perform:
Characteristics of the nonessentialist leader:
Characteristics of the essentialist leader:
Summary of the steps to being an essentialist leader:
Leading by applying the principle of less but better will allow your team or organization to make their highest collective contribution and achieve phenomenal results.