The Power Of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential

Principle 1: By setting limitations, we must choose the essential. So in everything you do, learn to set limitations.   Principle 2: By choosing the essential, we create great impact with minimal resources. Always choose the essential to maximize your time and energy.

The Power of Less is perfect for achieving goals: Limit yourself to fewer goals, and you’ll achieve more. At the same time, we’ll look at ways to narrow your focus on your projects, so that you can complete them more effectively and move forward on your goals. We’ll apply limitations to our projects to increase our effectiveness.

Protect your time - it's your most valuable commodity. Guard it with your life.

If something's not giving you value, consider eliminating it from your life.

Doing a huge number of things doesn’t mean you’re getting anything meaningful done.

I sit quietly with a cup of coffee, and enjoy the silence. I go for a morning run, which relieves stress and is perfect for contemplation. I use the quiet time before my family awakes to write something each morning. And I read, because a good novel is one of my favorite companions.

Set your 3 MITs (Most Important Tasks) each morning. Single-task. When you work on a task, don’t switch to other tasks. Process your in-box to empty. Check e-mail just twice a day. Exercise five to ten minutes a day. Work while disconnected, with no distractions. Follow a morning routine.

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.

I advocate single-tasking, focusing on one task at a time and working as simply as possible to preserve your mental health and to improve your effectiveness. Here are a few quick reasons not to multitask: Multitasking is less efficient, due to the need to switch gears for each new task and then switch back again. Multitasking is more complicated, and thus leaves you more prone to stress and errors. Multitasking can be crazy-making, and in this already chaotic world, we need to rein in the terror and find a little oasis of sanity and calm.

It shows others that your time is important. When we try to take on everything that comes our way, the people around us get the message that their time is more important than ours, that we’ll say yes to whatever requests they have. If, however, we have firm limits on what we do, we send the message that we value our time and our priorities. Others will value your time in return.

Unfortunately, that’s often not the case: We must wait for tasks or information or other things to be completed before we can move on to the next step. And so we multitask, but not on the task level—we multitask only on the project level. While one project is on hold for an hour or a day or a few days, we can be working on another. I’ve found that three projects works best for this type of project-level multitasking—any more than three, and you begin to lose effectiveness. For this system to work, a project should take no more than a month to complete, and preferably only a week or two. If a project takes a year to complete (for example), then you will not be able to work on any other projects for a year. That’s too long to put the rest of your life on hold. Instead, break long-term projects into smaller projects that can be completed in a month or less. If you want to launch a magazine, for example, focus first on the project of coming up with a design, then on putting together a team, then on finding financial backing, and so on.

Why not have just one project? If limiting yourself to three projects makes you more effective, why not limit yourself to one project to make yourself even more effective? You’d think this would be logical, especially as I recommended having just One Goal. However, the reality is that almost every project is held up as you wait for information, for other people to get back to you, for others to complete tasks, for vendors or clients to do something. It’s rare that you can start a project and work on it until it’s finished, without any waiting. If this is possible, I suggest you do exactly that: Start a project and don’t work on anything else until the project is completed.