The Minimalist Mindset

by Danny Dover

In the world that you and I live in most prisoners are not imprisoned by tangible chains, but instead by objects of their own choosing.

Minimalism is the constant art of editing your life.

Asking someone what makes them happy is usually too blunt an exercise and results in generic advice.

Unlike asking someone what makes them happy, asking someone to tell you one of their favorite life stories brings out the light in people’s eyes.

“Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.” Benjamin Franklin

A mindset is a perspective through which ideas are filtered. An idea can burn out quickly, but a mindset lasts.

You can trade time for money (we call this a job) and you can trade money for time (we call this convenience).

Instead of eliminating expenses at the bottom, I have found that it is a much more effective habit to eliminate expenses at the top. To do this, you must first identify what are your most expensive but overvalued expenses.

Remember, when you spend money, you are really trading the hours you worked to earn that money for whatever it is you are buying. The available hours of your life are always decreasing so make sure your trades are actually worth the exchange.

From a minimalist point of view, employment should serve only two goals: Funding that which allows you to live life well Attaining fulfillment

Any work that doesn’t lead to you accomplishing your most important goals is wasted energy and accumulates unnecessary stress.

the risk of divorce is 40 percent higher among long-distance commuters than among other couples).

The biggest cause for communication overload is a failure to set expectations about how any given communication channel will be treated.

never, ever, read an individual e-mail more than once.

The goal of minimalism with regard to objects is not to get rid of all of your things, instead it is to make room for what you truly think is important.

Remember, past purchase decisions do not need to control your ability to minimize in the present.

If someone constantly sucks energy from you without refilling it in return, you should be critical of their influence on your well-being.

The best way I have ever found to explain the difference between being cheap and being frugal is by how your money saving behavior affects other people.

If your efforts isolate you and offend other people, you are being cheap. If your efforts lighten your financial burden without negatively affecting others, you are being frugal.

Your efforts to remove things from your life must not cross the subtle line of negatively taking away from the people who are significant in your life.

For most people, spending time with family is what you want to maximize time for, not what you want to minimize.

Due to work commitments most of us spend most of our time with colleagues or strangers.

By far, the best strategy you can use for maximizing your effectiveness is to prioritize your actions.

an essential task is a task that either blocks other people, blocks myself, or has a approaching deadline associated with it.

If you find yourself in the all too common situation of obsessing over perfecting your project management tool, stop and go do some real work!

you can’t possibly make substantial progress on any of them if you have too many projects demanding your attention at any given time!”

addition is not possible without subtraction.