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This book is a good read for anyone who feels they live a busy but unproductive life.

Book Name: Essentialism

Author: Greg McKeown

Originally Published: 2014

Personal Rating: 9.5/10

🧠 What the book is about:

It’s an invitation to take control of your time and the things you want to do in life, rather than letting society dictate your priorities. The core principle is to do fewer things, but to do them better.

When you’re overcommitted, moving in a million directions at once, you make little to no progress. You end up feeling stagnant, stressed, tired, and feeling as if you have no time at all.

This book is a great read if you have ever felt:

• Lost and unsure about what to focus on.
• Overwhelmed by the constant stream of information bombarding you, leaving you uncertain about what to do with it.
• Dizzy from the different demands coming at you, making it difficult to determine which ones are truly important.

🚀 My thoughts?

The book offers simple yet powerful principles that serve as a true eye-opener. I used to struggle with saying NO (and I still do at times), often leading me to overcommit. I would frequently complain about how busy my life was, only to eventually realize that it was all within my control.

Time is scarce, and we must use it wisely.

We can do anything, but we can’t do everything.

✍🏻 My top quotes/ideas:

• Essentialism = Doing less, but better.
• The way of the Essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better. It doesn’t mean occasionally giving a nod to the principle. It means pursuing it in a disciplined way.
• Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done [the right way, at the right time]. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution by only doing what is essential.
• If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will. When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people - our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families - will choose for us, and we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important. We can either make the hard choices for ourselves or allow others to decide for us.
• Be mindful when you pursue everything, trying to do it all, trying to learn it all; you can lose your ability to discern the vital few from the trivial many. Everything isn’t important. You will be stretched thinner and thinner. You’ll end up making a milimitre of progress in a million directions.
• A non-Essentialist thinks almost everything is essential. An Essentialist thinks almost everything is non-essential.
• In our society we are punished for good behavior (saying no) and rewarded for bad behaviour (saying yes). The former is often awkward in the moment, and the latter is often celebrated in the moment.
• We have lost our ability to filter what is important and what isn’t. Psycologists call this decision fatigue: the more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorate.
• Live a life true to yourself, not the life others expect of yourself.
• We can’t have it all or do it all. Once we accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking “How can I make it all work?” and start asking the more honest question “Which problem do I want to solve?”
• Essentialists are selective in the choices they make. As Derek Sivers said in the popular TedTalk. “No More Yes. It’s either HELL YEAH! or No”. Put all decisions to the extreme test: if we feel total and utter conviction to do something, then we say yes. Anything less gets a thumbs down. If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no.
• Eliminating the non-essentials isn’t just about mental discipline. It’s about the emotional discipline necessary to say no to social pressure.
• Anyone can talk about the importance of focusing on the things that matter most - and many people do, but to see people who dare to live it is rare.
• “Uncommitting” can be harder than simply not committing in the first place.
• Non-Essentialists say yes because of feelings of social awkwardness and pressure. They say yes automatically, without thinking, often in pursuit of the rush one gets from having pleased someone. But Essentialists know that after the rush comes the pang of regret. Eventually they will wake up to the unpleasant reality that something more important must now be sacrificed to accommodate this new commitment. The point is not to say no to all requests. The point is to say no to the non-essentials so we can say yes to the things that really matter. It is to say no - frequently and gracefully - to everything but what is truly vital.
• Courage is key to the process of elimination. Without courage, the disciplined pursuit of less is just lip service. Have you ever felt tension between what you felt was right and what someone was pressuring you to do? Have you ever said yes when you mean to simply avoid conflict or friction? Have you ever felt too scared or timid to turn down an invitation or request from a boss, friend, neighbour or family member for fear of dissapointing them?
• The non-essentialist tends to always assume a best case scenario. Those who chronically underestimate how long something will really take. Yet inevitably these things take longer; something unexpected comes up, the task ends up being more involved than anticipated, or the estimate was simply way too optimistic in the first place. The way of the essentialist is different. The essentialist looks ahead. She plans. She prepares for different contingencies. She expects the unexpected. She creates a buffer to prepare for the unseen, thus giving herself some wiggle room when things come up, as they inevitably do.
• We can’t know what obstacles to remove until we’re clear on the desired outcome. When we don’t know what we’re trying to achieve, all change is arbitrary.
• Focus on doing the hardest thing first. A simple rule.
• When faced with so many tasks and obligations that you can’t figure out which to tackle first, stop. Take a deep breath, get present in the moment and ask yourself what is most important thing this very second? Not tomorrow or even an hour from now. If unsure, make a list of everything vying for your attention and cross of anything that’s not important right now.
• Once you become an essentialist, you will find that you aren’t like everybody else. When other people are saying yes, you will find yourself saying no. When other people are doing, you will find yourself thinking. When other people are speaking, you will find yourself listening. While others are complaining (bragging) about how busy they are, you will be just singing sympathetically, unable to relate. While others are living a live in stress and chaos, you’ll be living a life of impact and fulfilment. To live as an essentialist in our-too-many-things-to-do-all-the-time society is an act of quiet revolution.

🎯 Other interesting ideas from the book:

• The Paradox of Success: The pursuit of success can be a catalyst for failure. Success can distract us from focusing on the essential things that produced success in the first place.
  • Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it enables us to succeed at our endavour.
  • Phase 2: When we have success, we gain reputation as a “go to” person. We become “good old Raf”, who is always there when you need him, and we are presented with increased options and opportunities.
  • Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, which is actually code for demands upon our time and energies, it leads to diffused efforts. We get spread thinner and thinner.
  • Phase 4: We become distracted from what would otherwise be our highest level of contribution. The effect of our success has been to undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.
• Have you ever underestimated how long a task will take? If you have, you’re far from alone. The term for this common phenomenon is the ‘planning fallacy’. This term coined by Daniel Kahneman in 1979, refers to people’s tendency to underestimate how long a task will take, even when they have done the task before. One way to protect this is simply to add a 50% buffer to the time we estimate it will take to complete a task or a project. Not only this relieve the stress we feel about being late, but if we find that the task was easier and faster to execute than we expected (though this is rare), the extra found time feels like a bonus.
• Sunk-cost bias is the tendency to continue to invest time, money, or energy into something we know is losing proposition simply because we have already incurred, or sunk, a cost that cannot be recouped. This can easily become a vicious cycle: The more we invest in something, the harder it is to let go.
• The best asset we have for making a contribution to the world is ourselves. If we underinvest in ourselves, and by that I mean our minds, our bodies and our spirits, we damage the very tool we need to make our highest contribution. ie lack of sleep. “If you are so tough you can do anything, I have a challenge for you. If you really want to do something hard: say no to an opportunity so you can take a nap”. There are peole who can survive on a few hours of sleep, I’ve found that most of them are just so used to being tired they have forgotten what it really feels like to be fully rested. The Non-Essentialists see sleep as yet another burden on one’s already overextended, overcommitted, busy-but-not-always-productive life. The Essentialist instead see sleep as necessary for operating at high levels of contribution. They sistematically build sleep into their schedules so they can do more, achieve more, and explore more.
• When there is a serious lack of clarity about what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress, and frustration. Where there is a high level of clarity, on the other hand, people thrive.
• Instead of reacting to social pressures pulling you to go a million directions, learn to reduce, simplify, and focus on what is absolutely essential by eliminiating everything else.
• If your manager comes to you and asks you to do X, you can respond with “Yes. I’m happy to make this the priority. Which of these other projects should I deprioritise to pay attention to this new project?”
• Identify the “slowest hiker”: Instead of just jumping into a project, take a few minutes to think what are all the obstacles standing between me and getting this done? What is keeping me from completing this? What is the obstacle that, if removed, would make the majority of the other obstacles disappear?
• It’s hard to imagine executives who would be comfortable with employees bringing their children to work, yet they seem to have no problem expecting their employees to come into the office or to work on a project on a Saturday/Sunday.
• Once a month escape to think - no emails, no calls, no appointments. Deliberately set aside distraction-free time in a distraction-free space to do absolutely nothing other than think. Jeff Weiner (The CEO of LinkedIn), for example, schedules up to two hours of blank space on his calendar every day. At the beginning it felt like a waste of time, but eventually he found it to be his single most valuable productivity tool.
• The essentialists instead of trying to accomplish it all (and all at once), the essentialists starts small and celebrates progress. Instead of going for the big flashy wins that don’t really matter, the essentialist pursues small and simple wins in areas that are essential. Celebrate progress.
• How to control screen time with your children: We introduced a token system. Each children would be given ten tokens at the beginning of the week. These could each be traded in for either thirty minutes of screen time or fifty cents at the end of the week, adding up to $5 or five hours of screen time a week. If a child read a book for thirty minutes, that kid would earn an additional token, which could also be traded in for screen time or money.
• “Done is better than perfect”, a popular idea in Silicon Valley. In entrepreneurial circles the idea is expressed as creating an MVP (minimal viable product). What is the simplest possible product that will be useful and valuable to the intended customer? Similarly we can adopt the idea of “minimal viable progress”. What is minimal amount of progress that will be useful and valuable to the essential task were trying to get done?
• The power of habits (Charles Duhigg): Cue + Routine + Reward. The cue is a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use (the behaviour itself). Finally there’s a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular habit is worth remembering for the future. Over time this loop becomes more automatic as the cue and the reward become neurologically intertwined. What this means is that if we want to change our routine, we don’t really need to change the behaviour, rather we need to find the cue that is triggering the non-essential activity and find a way to associate the same cue with something that is essential. If your alarm clock going off in the morning triggers you to check your email, use it up as a cue to get up and read instead. At first overcoming the temptation will be difficult, but each time you execute the new behaviour, strengthens the link in your brain between the cue and the new behaviour, and soon, you’ll be subconsciously and automatically performing the new routine.
• Non-essentialist tend to be so preoccupied with past successes and failures, as well as future challenges and opportunities, that they miss the present moment. They become distracted, unfocused. The way of the essentialist is to turn into the present, to focus on the things that are truly important, not yesterday or tomorrow but right now.
• There are two ways of thinking about essentialism. The first is to think of it as something you do occasionally, the second is to think of it as something you are. It becomes the essence of who you are.
• We know instinctively that we cannot explore every single piece of information we encounter in our lives. Discerning what is essential to explore requires us to be disciplined in how we can scan and filter all the competing and conflicting facts, options, and opinions constantly vying for our attention.
• Essentialism is a discipline you apply each and everytime you are faced with a decision about whether to say yes or whether to politely decline. It’s a method for making the tough trade-off between lots of good things and a few really great things. It’s about learning how to do less but better so you can achieve the highest possible return on every precious moment of your life.
• If you could do only one thing with your life right now, what would you do?
• Non-Essentialists pay attention to the loudest voice, hear everything being said, and get overwhelemed by information, whereas the Essentialists pay attention to the signal in the noise, they hear what is not being said, they scan the essence of the information.
• Non-Essentialists have a vague, general vision or mission statement. The Essentialist has a strategy that is concrete and inspirational. Has intent that is both meaningful and memorable. Makes one decision that eliminates one thousand later decisions.
• The buffer: The only thing we can expect (with any great certainty) is the unexpected. Therefore, we can either wait for the moment and react to it or we can prepare. We can create a buffer.

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