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Essentialism, Greg McKeown, 2014
- Society encourages us to say yes to everything, leading to burnout.
- Working on too many things at once means we make barely any progress on any of the things.
- Essential things are important to us, not to others.
- We can always make choices.
- Not making a choice means there will be a default choice made for us.
- Accepting every opportunity is learned helplessness; we learnt that we cannot say no.
- Essentialism is about embracing saying no, accepting to loose opportunities to pick others up.
- Playing and sleeping boosts creativity.
- People almost always underestimate the time needed to complete a task (planning fallacy).
- Allocate more of each resource than what you estimate will be needed to avoid the planning fallacy.
- Removing and scaling down are effective methods to get things done. Maybe less things, but better.
- Aim for smaller goals to reduce the friction to get things done.
- Start things as soon as possible, way before the deadline, even when doing a very little amount of work as this can be effortless progress.
- Make progress visible to make it more encouraging (e.g. checkboxes on a todo list).
- Use habit formation techniques to make small changes towards the ideas of this book.
- Focus on the present, on doing what is important right now instead of thinking about past mistakes or worrying about the future.