Have you ever felt simultaneously overworked and underutilized? Busy but not productive? Always in motion but getting nowhere? If you, like me, answer positively to these questions, the book ‘Essentialism: the disciplined pursuit of less’ may help you to understand why you feel like this and what you can do about it.

According to the author, Greg Mckeown, these feelings derive from: a. decision fatigue (the more choices we have, the less qualitative our decisions are); b. opinion overload (connectedness has increased social pressure about what we should be doing of our lives); c. trade-off misunderstanding (by making everything a priority, nothing is a priority).

To tackle these challenges, Mckeown’s solution is to become an Essentialist. An Essentialist is someone who lives by design (not by default). Someone who is able to distinguish the vital few from the trivial many. Someone who has a disciplined, systematic approach to pursue the proposition ‘less but better’. Who does not want to be like that? The question is ‘how to get there’?. 

Mckeown’s methodology consists of exploring, eliminating, executing. He uses the metaphor of a wardrobe to explain the 3 phases: 

Explore: rather than asking ‘is there a chance I will wear this someday?’, more concrete questions such as ‘do I love this?’, ‘do I look great in it?’, ‘do I wear this often?’ are asked;

Eliminate: instead of being caught by the sunk-cost bias (attribution of higher value to things we have), a reset/starting point scenario is brought to mind and the question ‘how much would I spend on it if I have not made any investment?’ is answered;

Execute: once you have a small pile of ‘must keep’ clothes and a large bag of ‘should probably get rid of’, you need a regular routine to keep your wardrobe tidy making the execution as effortless as possible. 

If the wardrobe metaphor doesn’t help you, Mckeown provides other means to become an Essentialist. He refers, for example, to the journalistic work of seeing the invisible threat connecting apparently unrelated events and the art of removing data which is not relevant for the narrative as a way of grasping the ‘explore’ and ‘eliminate’ concepts. He provides examples of one-time decisions which unleashes a thousand decisions so that we do not ask the same questions over and over again, clarifying what he means by ‘effortless execution’. I particularly like when he describes how a Scout leader was able to get a group of boys to a campsite before the sunset in a coordinated pace reducing the weight carried by the slowest hiker.   

Being graduated in journalism and working with project management in the last 8 years, the essentialist mindset has been a guiding principle for me. Its application, though, has not been smooth and easy. Many times, I feel that I haven’t brainstorm (explore) enough, others that I let the filter (elimination) be too broad. Whenever this happens, the implementation (execution) is often demanding as the energy is dispersed in a thousand directions. The solution, I found, is to pause, re-assess the priority/trade-off list in a very concrete and selective way so that I can remove the underlying key obstacle which is blocking the most vital gateways.