Essentialism

Essentialism will show you a new, better way of looking at productivity by giving you permission to be extremely selective about what’s truly essential in your life and then ruthlessly cutting out everything else.

If you’re not doing anything, that of course means you’re not getting important things done.

However, so does doing everything.

Both camps are equally bad and a result of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is a concept first observed by Martin Seligman, happiness researcher and author of Learned Optimism.

It was originally observed in an experiment where dogs were administered electric shocks. All dogs had a lever they could pull, which would stop the shocks for one group, but not for the other.

Later both groups of dogs were placed in a large box with a low divider between a shock zone and a shock free zone. The dogs who had had the chance to stop the shocks before instantly jumped to the shock free zone – the ones where the lever had been of no use didn’t.

They had learned to be helpless and just accepted their fate.

Whether we’re doing nothing or trying to do everything, we’re giving up our power to choose, just like the dogs.

When you find yourself throughout your day, saying “I have to do X, I have to do Y”, over and over again, it’s likely you’ve to some extent given others the power to choose for you.

Here’s how to go from “I have to” to “I choose to”.

Jack Dorsey explained the job of being the CEO of Twitter as being like an editor. He has to edit teams, financials, and the company’s vision on a consistent basis. Being an editor is about adding, but mostly about removing what’s not adding. Essentialism teaches you to become the editor of your own life, and one of the rules it gives you to do so is the 90% rule. For every item, to do, or decision you consider, only look at the most important criterion and give it a value between 0 and 100. Everything that’s under 90 is considered a 0, and has to go. For example, when sorting out your closet, you could calculate the likelihood of ever wearing a piece of clothing again – if it’s below 90%, why keep it? Similarly, for your to-do list, you can ask: “How likely is this to really help me make progress towards my most important goal?” This is very similar to Steve Jobs’s advice about focus and Derek Sivers’s “It’s either hell yes, or no” approach and will help you say no more often, to leave only the things in your life which are adding the most value to…