Why Minimizing Your Life

Take a few moments to create a plan of where you would like to see yourself in the next couple of months or years. 

Align those dreams with your priorities to help you focus on making your wishes come true. 

It's important to remember to set time aside for things that truly matter to you. 

Whatever it is, you won't feel fulfilled if you constantly put other things before your own happiness.

• Important tasks are things that contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals.
• Urgent tasks are tasks that have to be dealt with immediately: phone calls, urgent deadlines, and situations where you have to respond quickly.

Sometimes important tasks stare you right in the face, but you neglect them and respond to urgent but unimportant things.

Time, not money, is your most valuable asset. Invest your asset:

• Allocate time to each task you need to get done every day. 
• Each task of the day should be attainable, realistic, and time-bound. And it should advance your goals for the day, week or month.
  
• Don't get distracted by everything others expect you to do.
  

• Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. Creates value.
• Shallow work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. Doesn't create value.

• Monastic: maximize Deep Work by minimizing or removing shallow obligations. Isolate yourself for long periods of time without distractions; no shallow work allowed
• Bimodal: divide your time into some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leave the rest open to everything else. Reserve a few consecutive days when you will be working like a monastic. You need at least one day a week
• Rhythmic: involves creating a routine where you define a specific time period — ideally three to four hours every day — that you can devote to Deep Work
• Journalistic: alternate your day between deep and shallow work as it fits your blocks of time. Not recommended to try out first.

"One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all".

• A items : Things you must do, which will have a serious positive or negative consequence.
• B items : Things you should do, that have minor consequences.
• C items : Things that are nice to do but don’t have any real consequences when they’re done.
• D items : Things to delegate so you can free up more time to do A tasks.
• E items : Things to eliminate. Generally stuff you do out of habit.

We can reclaim our time and our attention. Unlike a physical space, we can wipe the slate clean in our digital environment.

If you clear apps from your phone, nothing will happen. You can always reinstall the ones you use.

• Clear your browser history.
• Unsubscribe from newsletters, podcasts, blogs, and anything else you consume.
• Delete all the apps that are currently on your phone and desktop or laptop (as long as you don’t have to buy a new version of anything).

We all need personal philosophy in life or we risk wandering and responding to random stimuli and information with little or no impact on our long-term goals.

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

The Decision Matrix on how to approach tasks has 4 quadrants:

• Quadrant 1: The Urgent Problems which are important.
• Quadrant 2: Not Urgent but important tasks
• Quadrant 3: Urgent but not really important
• Quadrant  4: Distractions and time-wasting tasks. 

Prioritize the important (Quadrant 2) to attain maximum benefit from your work.

Productivity is directly related to your energy level.

Find your most productive hours — the time of your peak energy — and schedule Deep Work for those periods. Do low-value and low-energy tasks (also known as shallow work), such as responding to emails or unimportant meetings, in between those hours.

Before going to bed, spend 5 minutes writing your to-do list for the next day. These tasks should help you move towards your professional and personal goals.

You’ll be better prepared mentally for the challenges ahead before waking up and there won’t be any room for procrastination in the morning. As a result, you’ll work faster and smoother than ever before.

Urgent but unimportant tasks = distractions.

Urgent tasks put us into constant “reply mode.” Important work is related to planned tasks that move us closer to our goals.

Anytime you are pulled away from your tasks, it takes time to readjust to them when you jump back in (sometimes it can take up to 25 minutes).

Interruptions (notifications, loud noises, social media, checking email etc.) harm your concentration.