Greg McKeown has written an insightful book on how to prioritise and de-prioritise things in your life to become more effective. The core idea, that challenged everything I knew about prioritisation, was that effective prioritising is not about which things to drop from your attention but which (few) things to go big on. Once you internalise this, you think about subtracting items from your life in a radically different way. In doing so, dropping an item from the todo list doesn’t really even feel like a loss.
The book is written in 4 parts. The first part expands on what McKeown calls Essentialism. The second part talks about exploring many ideas to figure out the most important ones. The third part helps you eliminate the trivial many to arrive at the essential few. Finally, the fourth part talks about techniques you can use to execute the essential .
The Essentialist
The essence of an essentialist is that they always eliminate the trivial many to arrive at the essential few. At its core lie 3 beliefs that we often overlook or ignore.
Choice – We often surrender our option to choose. ‘Yes’ becomes a default answer and we let other people’s priorities dictate ours. It may sound overly simplistic, but it is essential to remember that you have the power to choose at all times. Instead of making your default answer Yes, make it Maybe. Think about the decision at length and see if it aligns with your goals.
Noise – Most of the stuff around us is noise and only a select few options are vital. This also highlights why holding on to the power to choose is so important. Since most things are noise, your default answer should be ‘Maybe’ or ‘No’.
Trade-offs – Making trade-offs in the right way to suit the core objective is an essentialist’s biggest skill. When faced with a choice of whether to do n things or one, an essentialist asks the tougher question – which is the most relevant thing and makes the right trade offs. Trading of is not asking what I am going to give up on but what do I want to go big on.
Exploring to reach the essential
Understanding how to figure out what is or isn’t essential is the main task that an essentialist concerns herself with. An essentialist schedules blank times to actually get bored and think about priorities. Here are several tips that are offered to allow your mind to explore broadly and make connections and associations a busy mind would never do.
- Reading 5 min of classics in the morning to absorb ideas that have stood the test of time.
- Listening intently for ‘the lead’. The lead (in journalism parlance) is the key information that is hidden in data that would shed light into the matter. It is beyond facts and figures that often take up most of our mindspace.
- Take care of the asset – You are your the asset in question here. Taking care of yourself, making time for rest, leisure, sleep, long nature walks, etc are all parts of taking care of yourself and paving the way to become an essentialist.
- Indulge in play as it lights up brains creativity. This is why offices of Google, Pixar, Apple, etc are so designed. They act as storehouses of play and intend to spark creativity in their people.
- Ask yourself 3 questions. What do I feel inspired by? What am I particularly good at? What meets a significant need in the world? The intersection of this is what is usually essential.
- The 90% rule. Have one big criteria and rate the choice of the options between 0 and 100 on it. Only do it if it scores over 90. Super important and applicable when non ideal choices pop up at either a discount or some other benefit. The crux of this is that the answer to anything is either a definite yes or a no.
Eliminate to arrive at the essential few
Eliminating the trivial many is important to get to the essential few. The 2×2 matrix illustrated below shows how we hover between concrete-generic and inspiration-boring quadrants. The top right corner is the just right segment which is where we go after the essential inspirational goals with a concrete plan.
An interesting point that the author makes is that talking about eliminating the non essential or saying No to things is actually about courage. It is actually weak to say Yes quickly and then doubling down on a verbal commitment made purely out of instinct. The general plan of action should be a slow yes (thinking and then answering) and a quick No (make it your default answer if required). FOMO drives a lot of our decision making and waste collection so be careful while making new commitments. Remember, people use your sprinklers to water their lawns all the time. Be cautious when people pull you in things that are not essential for you.
Eliminating things from our life is hard because of sunk cost (we pour more $$ and energy because we already have done so in the past and now want to see it through) and endowment effects (us valuing thing more than what they are worth because we own it). The right analogy for this is your closet. We all have those extra clothes that we now hate or at least are indifferent to. We still keep them because we bought them once. Instead of letting them take up space, we must ask ourselves if I did not have this piece of clothing (or opportunity), how much would I be willing to pay for it today. This line of questioning brings us closer to how we feel about retaining something.
0 based budget is when instead of using last year’s budget, accountants start fresh. This eliminates status quo bias and is a great tool to think afresh. A similar simple technique is called reverse prototyping. It is a methodology whereby you test your hypotheses by eliminating certain things and seeing how it affects you. The simplest way to try this is to question every assumption by picking them out one by one and see how it affects your outcome. This helps you get to the most essential assumptions or most important constraints.
##### Executing the essential
The final part of the book deals with making systems and processes to remove roadblocks and do less, better.
Boundaries as act as constraints that force you to pick the right problems. Budget, workforce, time, etc can be some parameters along which boundaries can be set up. These boundaries spawn creativity but also help to act as milestones to help you evaluate your progression.
Keeping time buffers for the unexpected makes for resilient plans. The simplest way to understand is to imagine the last time you took a trip. If we keep delaying packing the luggage and do it an hour or so before leaving, we set ourselves up for chaos. Instead imagine packing our luggage the night before and getting a good night’s sleep. This is extreme preparation in which we don’t assume the best case scenario and assume some things will go awry. As a rule always budget 50% extra time and always plan ahead.
Making routines to go through your day helps make accomplishing difficult things easy. Routines run on the back of brain cells making synapses that make us more efficient in following actions we do regularly. This is why making routines is so helpful. If you make weeding out non-essential routine then it will happen naturally. While doing your routine, a helpful tip is doing your hardest thing on your plate first. Mix things around to make sure your routines don’t get boring. Following routines and [getting to flow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)) is an essentialists ultimate aim.
Focus on what is important now. This is obviously easier said than done. Staying in the present and focussing on now is one of the hardest things to do. If you’re not sure what those are, pause, sit down and write down things that are important now. Writing down all that is important, has a calming effect and makes you feel in control and mentally prepares you start dealing with the items one by one.
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I run a startup called [Harmonize](http://www.harmonizehq.com/). We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, [I tweet ](https://twitter.com/dillisingh)about startup life and practical wisdom in books.