IN THIS CHAPTER, we’ll explore Principle 2, Choose the Essential, and then Principle 3, Simplifying. Choosing the essential is the key to simplifying—you have to choose the essential before you simplify, or you’re just cutting things out without ensuring that you’re keeping the important things.
How do you know what’s essential? That’s the key question. Once you know that, the rest is easy.
Once you know what’s essential, you can reduce your projects, your tasks, your stream of incoming information, your commitments, your clutter. You just have to eliminate everything that’s not essential.
It’s like the old joke: how do you carve a statue of an elephant? Just chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. Well, first you have to know what the elephant looks like.
PUT THE HORSE BEFORE THE CART
Many productivity systems will tell you to do things in reverse: They’ll tell you how to do things quickly, without trying to figure out what things you should be doing. They’ll tell you how to get the urgent tasks done, and how to handle a mass of assignments and information coming at you, but these systems don’t do a good job of discriminating between what’s important and what’s not, and you end up doing everything that’s thrown at you. That puts you at the mercy of the flow of tasks and information coming at you—in other words, at the mercy of anyone’s whim or requests.
Instead, you must ask yourself in everything you do, what is essential? Whether that’s asking yourself what you want to do today, or this week, or this year, or in your life in general, ask yourself what is essential. Whether that be deciding which e-mails to reply to, what you can buy this month with your limited budget, how to declutter your desk or your house—ask yourself what the essentials are.
That puts the horse before the cart, instead of after it—you’re identifying the essential, and then accomplishing those essentials.
CHOOSING THE ESSENTIAL: A SERIES OF QUESTIONS
In everything you do, use these questions to guide you to choose the essential, especially if you have problems deciding. Once you get the hang of it, you won’t need these questions anymore—they’ll become automatic.
1. What are your values? Values are simply knowing what things are most important to you. Think about the things that really matter to you, the qualities you want to have, the principles you want to live your life by. Once you’ve identified these values, everything you do and choose should follow from those.
2. What are your goals? What do you want to achieve in life? How about over the next year? How about this month? And today? If you know what you’re trying to achieve, you can determine if an action or item will help you achieve it.
3. What do you love? Think about what you love, who you love to spend time with, what you love doing.
4. What is important to you? Along the same lines, make a list of the most important things in your life, in your work, or in whatever area you’re thinking about.
5. What has the biggest impact? If you have a choice to make between a list of projects or tasks, think about which project or task will make the biggest difference in your life or career. What will have the biggest effect on everything else? For example, if you have a choice between making some calls, having a meeting, and writing a report, think about the impact each task will have: the calls are to clients who spend perhaps one hundred dollars each on your company, the meeting is with a client who will bring in ten thousand dollars in business if you can close the deal, and the report is something that might not even be read. The meeting, in this example, has the biggest impact, and is therefore the most essential.
6. What has the most long-term impact? There’s a difference between the size of an impact and its long-term value. For example, a meeting with a client might bring in ten thousand dollars next week, but a long-term marketing campaign might bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next year. The impact doesn’t have to be in terms of money—it could be anything that’s valuable to you.
7. Needs vs. wants. This is a good criteria to use when you’re trying to decide whether to spend on certain items: Which items do you actually need, and which ones are just things you want? If you can identify needs, you can eliminate most of the wants, which are nonessential.
8. Eliminate the nonessential. Sometimes it’s useful to work backward, if you’re having trouble figuring out the essentials. If you have a list of things to do, for example, start by crossing off the nonessential items. You know that washing your car, for example, isn’t as important as paying your bills or fixing that leak that is costing you hundreds of dollars on your water bill. Once you eliminate some of the nonessential stuff, you are left with the more essential things on the list.
9. Continual editing process. Most of the time you don’t pare things all the way down to the essentials on your first try. You eliminate some of the nonessentials and give the remaining things a try. Then you take another look at it in a week or two and eliminate more things. Continue that process until you are happy that you can’t eliminate anything else.
HOW TO APPLY THE QUESTIONS
The list of questions above is a good way to determine which things are essential to you if you’re having difficulties, no matter what area of your life you’re examining. From your work projects and tasks, to e-mails, to finances, to goals, to your commitments in life, to the clutter in your home and on your desk, identifying the essentials is the first and most important step in simplifying things so that you can be more effective.
The key is to take a few moments (or hours, or days, if necessary) to stop what you’re doing and think about it in a broader perspective. Are you focusing on the essentials? What are the essentials? Can you eliminate the nonessentials? Take the time to ask yourself the questions above and you’ll do a much better job of honing in on what you really need to do, and really want to do—a better job of focusing on what’s important, and on getting the important things done. That’ll cut back on the time you spend doing things that aren’t important, that you don’t love doing, that don’t lead to the accomplishment of your goals.
Here are some ways you can apply the essentials questions (with more detail in the following chapters on these topics):
Simplifying isn’t meant to leave your life empty—it’s meant to leave space in your life for what you really want to do. Know what those things are before you start simplifying.
Principle 3: Simplifying—Eliminating the Nonessential
Once you’ve identified the essential, the task of simplifying is theoretically easy—you just have to eliminate all the nonessential. However, in practice this isn’t always easy, although it does get less difficult the more you do it.
Let’s say you have a task list, for example, and you’ve identified the top three things you need to do on that list. To simplify the list, you’d want to eliminate as many of the nonessential things on the list as possible—everything that’s not identified as essential. So you start by crossing off the things that aren’t really important, then delegating other tasks that can be done by coworkers, and finally postponing assignments that you do need to get done but that don’t need to be done today.
The hard part comes when others want you to get something done, but you don’t think it’s essential. In that case, you’ll have to learn to say “no.” We’ll talk more about this in the chapter on Simple Commitments, but for now it’s useful to understand that saying “no” is simply a commitment to sticking to the essentials. If that means telling people you don’t have time to do more, then that’s what the commitment means. And saying “no” gets easier with practice, especially as you gain confidence that sticking to the essential is something that will have great benefits to you in the long term. Additionally, others will start to respect you for being honest about what commitments you can take on without overloading yourself, and they will start to respect your time if you respect it first.