MOST OF US lead lives filled with too much stuff, too much information, too many papers, too much to do, too much clutter. Unfortunately, our time and space is limited, and having too much of everything is like trying to cram a library into a single box: It can’t be done, it’s hard to enjoy the books, and sooner or later the box will break.
Our problem is living without limits. It’s like going shopping without spending limits—you tend to go overboard and end up with a bunch of stuff you don’t need or really want much. But if you have a budget (say one hundred dollars), you’ll choose only the things that matter, and you’ll end up with much less junk.
Our entire lives are like this: We live without limits. And while that freedom can seem fun at first, after a while it gets to be too much. We don’t have enough room for everything. We can’t handle the stress of trying to do everything. We just can’t fit it in our lives, no matter how much we’d like to do so.
It weakens us in so many ways. It dilutes our power and effectiveness. It spreads us too thin. It tires us out so that we don’t have the energy to handle the important stuff. A life without limits is taking a cup of red dye and pouring it into the ocean, and watching the color dilute into nothingness. Limited focus is putting that same cup of dye into a gallon of water.
Limitless is the pitcher who pitches nine innings every three days, throwing as many pitches as he can, as hard as he can. Soon he’s too tired to pitch very hard, if at all. The real power is when that same pitcher comes in for one inning every three days and can mow down the batters every time.
Limitless is trying to excavate an entire acre of land with a single shovel. Limited focus is digging with that same shovel in one spot until you hit water.
Limitless is weak. Learn to focus yourself with limits, and you’ll increase your strength. In this chapter, we’ll explore Principle 1, Setting Limits.
HOW LIMITS CAN HELP
Going from a limitless life that’s overwhelming and not very effective to a life with limits, focus, and power is an incredible transformation.
Here are just a few benefits of setting limits on everything you do:
What areas of your life need limits? Everything that you feel is in any way overloaded. Every area that you’d like to improve.
You don’t need to revamp your entire life all at once. That’s a sure recipe for failure, actually. Taking on too much at once is the antithesis of this book—to succeed at setting limits, you should start with one area at a time, and preferably an area with a great likelihood of success.
Where should you start? That can’t be prescribed, as each person’s life is different, and you’ll need to do what works for you. Take a few minutes to think about your life—what areas take up too much time, or seem overloaded? What would you like to simplify? Some ideas for good places to start:
These are just ideas, of course. You’ll slowly be expanding into other areas. Focus on one change at a time until it becomes a part of your routine, and you’re comfortable with the limit.
HOW TO SET LIMITS
When you first set a limit on something, it’ll be a fairly arbitrary number, as it will take some time to see what works for you. However, setting limits isn’t just pulling a random number out of a hat—it’s based on your experience with that type of activity, and based on what you think your ideal is.
For example, when you first set a limit on the number of times you plan to check your e-mail, if you just randomly select a number, it could be well over a thousand. But you know from experience that that would obviously be too high a limit, so you’ll likely choose from a range that’s reasonable based on your years of experience in checking e-mail. Let’s say you normally check e-mail ten to fifteen times a day, and that seems like too much for you. You’re spending most of your day in e-mail, instead of getting your other work done. So you might choose from a range of one to five times, as that seems ideal. Maybe you’ll try twice a day—once in the morning and once before you leave work.
The next step is to test it out, to see if that limit works for you. Is it a limit you can reasonably stick to? Is it hurting your communication with others in an appreciable way? Are you able to get much more work done with this limit?
Think of your first week with that limit as an experiment. If it doesn’t work for you (and there’s no single limit that works for everyone), then adjust it a bit. If twice a day isn’t often enough, try three times a day. If you think you can get by with even less, try once a day. Then test that new limit out until you find what works for you, and until you make that limit a part of your daily routine. Once it’s a habit, you can move on to the next area of your life. So setting limits for anything else will work the same way:
Once you’ve learned to set limits, you will then learn to make the most of those limits—by choosing the essential and then simplifying. That’s when the power of limits can really be seen: when the limits force you to reduce yourself to only the essentials. We’ll discuss this in the next chapter.