deepstash
Beta
How to Minimize Your Life: The Unimportance of Practically Everything
How to Minimize Your Life
- Decide what’s unimportant: cover the low priorities of your life. You might discover you are focusing on the wrong priorities and cluttering your brain and wasting your time.
- Know what’s important: move to what’s really important to you. These are the things you love, bringing you joy.
- Question everything, constantly: adopt a new mentally of simplification, questioning yourself constantly if you are allocating your time, attention, and money, wisely.
1916 SAVES
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
6
Key Ideas
Oliver Emberton
Important vs. urgent tasks
- 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.
Don't be available all the time
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.
7
Key Ideas
The new law of productivity
High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
Deep work vs. Shallow work
- 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.
4 philosophies to integrate Deep Work into your life
- 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.
6
Key Ideas
Start with a clean plate
If your plate were completely clean, with limited space, what would you put on it today?
Once you’ve figured that out, you know what belongs on your plate. Constantly loo...
Learn to say “NO”
Feeling like you’re doing busywork is often the result of saying yes too often. We have to let go of this idea of doing everything and pleasing everyone and being everywhere at once.
Properly manage your yeses. So stop saying “yes” when you want to say “no.” Sometimes you have to set clear boundaries.
3 Core things
Focus on no more than three core things every day.
Wake up every morning and figure out what the most important two or three things are for the day, and cut out the rest. Give each some allotted time instead of switching tasks.