WE LIVE IN a world where, more often than not, more is better. We are after more money, to buy bigger houses and cars, and more clothes and gadgets and furniture. We need bigger shopping malls rather than the small shops of yesterday. We consume more, and we produce more, and we do more than ever before.
At some point, however, we run into limits. There is only so much we can do or consume. There are a finite number of hours in a day, and once we reach that limit to our production, we can’t do more. Many people see these limits as problems, while others see them as a challenge: How can I squeeze more into my day? If I manage my time effectively and learn to be more productive, can I get more done in the limited number of hours available to me?
The problem with constantly trying to increase volume is that it doesn’t always produce the best results. Doing a huge number of things doesn’t mean you’re getting anything meaningful done. In fact, it’s so hit-and-miss that it’s almost like playing a game of roulette: If you do enough tasks, one of them is bound to pay off big.
It doesn’t work that way. Doing more things means you’re likely to do a lot of unimportant things, and you’ll be overworked and stressed at the same time.
Imagine two reporters working at a newspaper: One goes for a high volume of articles each week, and the other decides to do only one. The reporter writing thirty articles a week scans a vast amount of sources for any little bit of information that’s remotely interesting, turning each into a short, quick, and fairly limited article that doesn’t get much attention. His editor is pleased by the amount of work he’s doing, and he gets rewarded with praise.
The second reporter decides that if he’s just going to do one article this week, he’d better make it count. He spends half of the first day researching and brainstorming and thinking until he chooses a high-impact story that he knows will knock people’s socks off. It’ll be an article that wins awards. He spends two days researching it and another couple days writing it and checking facts.
Guess what happens? Not only does he produce the best article of the week, but it becomes an award-winning article, one that the readers love and that gets him a promotion and long-term and widespread recognition. From that article, and others like it, he can build a career. The first reporter was thinking high-volume, but short-term. The second reporter focused on less, but it did much more over the long-term.
That’s the Power of Less.
THE LESSONS OF THE HAIKU
The fairly popular form of Japanese poetry known as the haiku has a couple of interesting lessons to teach us about why less is powerful. The haiku, as you may know, is usually a nature-related poem of just seventeen syllables, written in three lines (five syllables, then seven, then five). A poet writing a haiku must work with those limitations, must express an entire idea or image in only that number of syllables. It can be a daunting task if you have something important to convey.
So the haiku poet has a couple of choices: He can quickly whip out seventeen syllables and have a completed haiku in a short amount of time; or he can carefully choose only the essential words and images needed to convey his idea. And this second choice is what creates some of the most powerful poetry in such a limited form—choosing only the essential. So the lessons we can pick up from the haiku are the first two principles of simple productivity:
Principle 1: By setting limitations, we must choose the essential. So in everything you do, learn to set limitations.
Principle 2: By choosing the essential, we create great impact with minimal resources. Always choose the essential to maximize your time and energy.
These two lessons form the key to this book. They are the Power of Less in two sentences. Everything after this is simply an exploration of these concepts, or practical ways to apply them to many areas of your life.
CHOOSING THINGS WITH THE MOST IMPACT
In our work lives, we can be like the first reporter in the example above, cranking out tasks like crazy, and we’ll probably get a whole lot done and be praised for it. People like to see hard workers who will handle anything thrown at them.
However, we can make another choice: We can be like the second reporter and choose to do fewer things, but things with the most impact. What does that mean, “the most impact”? A task or project could be “high-impact” in a number of different ways. It could:
These are just some examples—you can probably think of other ways a task or project can be high-impact.
How can you determine which tasks have the most impact? There are generally two good ways of doing this.
1. Examine your task list. Take a look at everything on your list and ask yourself the following questions about each one: Will this have an impact that will last beyond this week or this month? How will it change my job, my career, my life? How will this further a long-term goal of mine? How important is that goal? From these answers, you can determine which items will have the most impact over the long term. While this sounds like a tedious process, it actually gets very easy with practice, and soon you’ll be able to do it in just a few minutes.
2. Start with your goals. If you start by identifying the things you really want to accomplish in the next year, you can plan your tasks so that you are doing things each day to further those goals along. Let’s say you have three long-term goals—each day, choose a task from your list that will move you closer to those goals. This will ensure that you are completing the tasks with the most impact, because they relate directly to a long-term goal.
Which of these two methods should you use? Whichever method works for you. We’ll talk more about working with goals and tasks in later chapters, but for now I just want to point out that it’s not an either/or choice. You can try a combination of both of the above methods, and in fact, I think that’s necessary. You can do your best to plan for your goals, but even the best of us has tasks outside of those goals that must be completed. All your tasks will pile up in a long list (if you’re careful to write them down) and the non-goal tasks can easily push back your goal tasks. What you’ll need to do is do a review of your task list (method number one above) to choose the high-impact tasks, instead of trying to tackle everything regardless of how meaningful the tasks are to your life.
APPLYING LIMITATIONS TO EVERY ASPECT OF LIFE
The lessons of the haiku, of applying limitations in order to force choices, of choosing the essential and finding the Power of Less—these are lessons we can apply not only to the tasks on our to-do lists, but to everything in our lives. If there’s any area of your life that is overwhelming you, and that you’d like to simplify, apply limitations.
Have too many e-mails in your in-box? Apply a limitation: You’ll only check e-mail twice a day, and only respond to five e-mails each time. You’ll be forced to work more effectively, and only write important e-mails.
Have too many projects? Limit them to three. Have too much stuff in your house? Limit yourself to two hundred items. You get the idea.
We’ll explore these different areas in more detail and see how the lessons of the haiku can transform these areas of your life into something powerful and meaningful, but for now, it helps to ask yourself the following questions:
These are just preliminary questions for now; we’ll explore this in more detail and figure out what’s essential and what isn’t as we get into the following chapters.