Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

Essentialists accept they cannot be popular with everyone all of the time. Yes, saying no respectfully, reasonably, and gracefully can come at a short-term social cost. But part of living the way of the Essentialist is realizing respect is far more valuable than popularity in the long run.

8. “I can’t do it, but X might be interested.”

“We need to learn the slow ‘yes’ and the quick ‘no.’ ”

HALF OF THE TROUBLES OF THIS LIFE CAN BE TRACED TO SAYING YES TOO QUICKLY AND NOT SAYING NO SOON ENOUGH.

Sunk-cost bias is the tendency to continue to invest time, money, or energy into something we know is a losing proposition simply because we have already incurred, or sunk, a cost that cannot be recouped.

It explains why we’ll continue to sit through a terrible movie because we’ve already paid the price of a ticket.

“the endowment effect,” our tendency to undervalue things that aren’t ours and to overvalue things because we already own them.

“If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?” We can do the same for opportunities and commitment. Don’t ask, “How will I feel if I miss out on this opportunity?” but rather, “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?” Similarly, we can ask, “If I wasn’t already involved in this project, how hard would I work to get on it?”7

Why are adults so much more vulnerable to the sunk-cost bias than young children? The answer, he believes, is a lifetime of exposure to the “Don’t waste” rule, so that by the time we are adults we are trained to avoid appearing wasteful, even to ourselves.8 “Abandoning a project that you’ve invested a lot in feels like you’ve wasted everything, and waste is something we’re told to avoid,” Arkes said.9

Only when we admit we have made a mistake in committing to something can we make a mistake a part of our past. When we remain in denial, on the other hand, we continue to circle pointlessly. There should be no shame in admitting to a mistake; after all, we really are only admitting that we are now wiser than we once were.

The tendency to continue doing something simply because we have always done it is sometimes called the “status quo bias.”

ZERO-BASED BUDGETING

In a reverse pilot you test whether removing an initiative or activity will have any negative consequences.

harder than simply not committing in the first place.

Clearly, editing—which involves the strict elimination of the trivial, unimportant, or irrelevant—is an Essentialist craft.

a good film editor makes it hard not to see what’s important because she eliminates everything but the elements that absolutely need to be there.

The Latin root of the word decision—cis or cid—literally means “to cut” or “to kill.”

we must summon the discipline to get rid of options or activities that may be good, or even really good, but that get in the way.

“I must apologize: if I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.” It’s true that doing less can be harder, both in art and in life.

For example, one employee at a company I’ve worked with (one who was well enough established to not have to worry about being fired) routinely skipped the weekly meeting other people attended and would simply ask them what he had missed. Thus he condensed a two-hour meeting into ten minutes and invested the rest of that redeemed time getting the important work done.

This may seem a little counterintuitive. But the best editors don’t feel the need to change everything. They know that sometimes having the discipline to leave certain things exactly as they are is the best use of their editorial judgment. It is just one more way in which being an editor is an invisible craft. The best surgeon is not the one who makes the most incisions; similarly, the best editors can sometimes be the least intrusive, the most restrained.

NO IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE.

“That taught me an important lesson. If I had made an exception then I might have made it many times.”2 Boundaries are a little like the walls of a sandcastle. The second we let one fall over, the rest of them come crashing down.

if you don’t set boundaries—there won’t be any. Or even worse, there will be boundaries, but they’ll be set by default—or by another person—instead of by design.

Nonessentialists tend to think of boundaries as constraints or limits, things that get in the way of their hyperproductive life. To a Nonessentialist, setting boundaries is evidence of weakness. If they are strong enough, they think, they don’t need boundaries. They can cope with it all. They can do it all. But without limits, they eventually become spread so thin that getting anything done becomes virtually impossible.

Essentialists, on the other hand, see boundaries as empowering. They recognize that boundaries protect their time from being hijacked and often free them from the burden of having to say no to things that further others’ objectives instead of their own. They know that clear boundaries allow them to proactively eliminate ...

DON’T ROB PEOPLE OF THEIR PROBLEMS

when people make their problem our problem, we aren’t helping them; we’re enabling them. Once we take their problem for them, all we’re doing is taking away their ability to solve it.

Boundaries.

Imagine a neighbor who never waters his lawn. But whenever you turn on your sprinkler system, the water falls on his lawn. Your grass is turning brown and dying, but Bill looks down at his green grass and thinks to himself, “My yard is doing fine.” Thus everyone loses: your efforts have been wasted, and Bill never develops the habit of watering his own lawn. The solution? As Cloud puts it, “You need some fences to keep his problems out of your yard and in his, where they belong.”

BOUNDARIES ARE A SOURCE OF LIBERATION

This truth is demonstrated elegantly by the story of a school located next to a busy road. At first the children played only on a small swath of the playground, close to the building where the grownups could keep their eyes on them. But then someone constructed a fence around the playground. Now the children were able to play anywhere and everywhere on the playground. Their freedom, in effect, more than doubled.4 Similarly, when we don’t set clear boundaries in our lives we can end up imprisoned by the limits others have set for us. When we have clear boundaries, on the other hand, we are free to select from the whole area—or the whole range of options—that we have deliberately chosen to explore.

While Nonessentialists tend to force execution, Essentialists invest the time they have saved by eliminating the nonessentials into designing a system to make execution almost effortless.

if you want your closet to stay tidy you need a regular routine. You need to have one large bag for items you need to throw away and a very small pile for items you want to keep. You need to know the dropoff location and the hours of your local thrift store. You need to have a scheduled time to go there.

GIVE ME SIX HOURS TO CHOP DOWN A TREE AND I WILL SPEND THE FIRST FOUR SHARPENING THE AXE.

The only thing we can expect (with any great certainty) is the unexpected. Therefore, we can either wait for the moment and react to it or we can prepare. We can create a buffer.

we can reduce the friction of executing the essential in our work and lives simply by creating a buffer.

The Nonessentialist tends to always assume a best-case scenario.

The Essentialist looks ahead. She plans. She prepares for different contingencies. She expects the unexpected. She creates a buffer to prepare for the unforeseen, thus giving herself some wiggle room when things come up, as they inevitably do.

The way of the Essentialist, on the other hand, is to use the good times to create a buffer for the bad.

ADD 50 PERCENT TO YOUR TIME ESTIMATE

“planning fallacy.”6 This term, coined by Daniel Kahneman in 1979, refers to people’s tendency to underestimate how long a task will take, even when they have actually done the task before.

people will admit to having a tendency to underestimate while simultaneously believing their current estimates are accurate.8

One study found that if people estimated anonymously how long it would take to complete a task they were no longer guilty of the planning fallacy.9 This implies that often we actually know we can’t do things in a given time frame, but we don’t want to admit it to someone.

One way to protect against this is simply to add a 50 percent buffer to the amount of time we estimate it will take to complete a task or project

Essentialists accept the reality that we can never fully anticipate or prepare for every scenario or eventuality; the future is simply too unpredictable. Instead, they build in buffers to reduce the friction caused by the unexpected.

TO ATTAIN KNOWLEDGE ADD THINGS EVERY DAY. TO ATTAIN WISDOM SUBTRACT THINGS EVERY DAY.

if you really want to improve the overall functioning of the system—whether that system is a manufacturing process, a procedure in your department, or some routine in your daily life—you need to identify the “slowest hiker.”

A Nonessentialist approaches execution in a reactive, haphazard manner. Because the Nonessentialist is always reacting to crises rather than anticipating them, he is forced to apply quick-fix solutions: the equivalent to plugging his finger into the hole of a leaking dam and hoping the whole thing doesn’t burst. Being good with a hammer, the Nonessentialist thinks everything is a nail. Thus he applies more and more pressure, but this ends up only adding more friction and frustration. Indeed, in some situations the harder you push on someone the harder he or she will push back.

Essentialists don’t default to Band-Aid solutions. Instead of looking for the most obvious or immediate obstacles, they look for the ones slowing down progress. They ask, “What is getting in the way of achieving what is essential?” While the Nonessentialist is busy applying more and more pressure and piling on more and more solutions, the Essentialist simply makes a one-time investment in removing obstacles. This ...