Essentialism - How to Organize your Life

These days I am pulled in many different directions at work – there is so much to do and not enough time for everything. Everything seems so important that I get fragmented and it becomes impossible to decide what to take up at the moment. I get stretched thinner and thinner trying to accomplish all of it. I end up making a millimeter of progress in a million directions, feeling overworked and underutilized.

I have also noticed that my attention span is eaten up by my smartphone with such a constant inflow of emails, calls, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter, that it is impossible to sit down and concentrate. I do not feel as if I am in control of my life and my time.

It went to the extreme when I was praying in a temple recently; one after other wishes came to my mind and soon I had about twenty wishes in the list. I knew it is ridiculous so I tried to identify the most important one from this list, but did not succeed. Then I said, “Let me try to prune this list down to top three wishes”. It did not work either. I could not drop anything from the list. I was surprised to find that it is so hard to decide the three most important things I want in life.

Something has definitely going wrong here recently. I was not like this earlier. Greg McKeown provides the answer to my problem in his book “Essentialism”. He says that the root cause is that we have started chasing more and more in modern times – and the solution lies in what he calls “the disciplined pursuit of less”. When we deliberately focus our energy on fewer important things, we can utilize it more effectively. This is what he calls “Essentialism”. The picture here illustrates the benefits of being an essentialist.

According to McKeown, the situation has become worse in recent times as there is an exponential growth in the information and choices available to people due to advances in technology. There is tremendous social expectations to do everything and be everywhere. Today’s generation grows up with a notion that “you can have it all”, which adds to this pressure to get more and do more. We have corporate environments that talk about work/life balance but still expect their employees to be on their smartphones 24/7/365.

The word ‘priority’ is singular and means the very first or prior thing. It is not meaningful to make it plural and talk about multiple first things. People and companies now routinely try to bend reality by talking about top ten priorities. This gives the impression that many things are priority but actually means nothing is. How is it possible to focus on ten different things?

Let us take the example of your wardrobe. If you do not spend effort to organize it, it may get cluttered over time with the stuff that you rarely wear. When it gets out of control, you try and purge the wardrobe. But unless you have a disciplined system, you will either end up with not discarding anything out of it or with regrets after discarding some useful cloth in a hurry. The essentialist will approach the same wardrobe differently. He will use the following disciplined approach to organize the wardrobe or his life:

1.    As a first step, the essentialist explores and evaluates the entire contents of wardrobe to identify the dresses that he likes most. In real life situations, this amounts to identifying the activities that will make the highest possible contribution towards your goal.
2.    In next step, the essentialist eliminates the rest of the stuff from the wardrobe. This is same as discarding everything but the most important activities from your to do list.
3.    The final step is to execute the most important activities with complete focus to get the best possible outcome.

You can immediately see the power of this idea – it helps you move from a cluttered, out of control life to an organized, effective and less stressful one. It also resonates well with the time tested principle of Aprigrah in Jainism which stands for eliminating unnecessary things from your possession.

Let us all make an effort to embrace Essentialism or Aparigrah in our day to day life, and increase our effectiveness by bringing back the lost focus.