Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

There’s an easier alternative. We can establish upper and lower bounds. Simply use the following rule: Never less than X, never more than Y.

Finding the right range keeps us moving at a steady pace so we can make consistent progress. The lower bound should be high enough to keep us feeling motivated, and low enough that we can still achieve it even on days when we’re dealing with unexpected chaos. The upper bound should be high enough to constitute good progress, but not so high as to leave us feeling exhausted. Once we get into the rhythm, the progress begins to flow. We are able to take Effortless Action.

An Effortless Summary Part I: Effortless State What is the Effortless State? The Effortless State is an experience many of us have had when we are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energized. You are completely aware, alert, present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in this moment. You are able to focus on what matters most with ease. INVERT Instead of asking, “Why is this so hard?,” invert the question by asking, “What if this could be easy?” Challenge the assumption that the “right” way is, inevitably, the harder one. Make the impossible possible by finding an indirect approach. When faced with work that feels overwhelming, ask, “How am I making this harder than it needs to be?” ENJOY Pair the most essential activities with the most enjoyable ones. Accept that work and play can co-exist. Turn tedious tasks into meaningful rituals. Allow laughter and fun to lighten more of your moments. RELEASE Let go of emotional burdens you don’t need to keep carrying. Remember: When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack. Use this habit recipe: “Each time I complain I will say something I am thankful for.” Relieve a grudge of its duties by asking, “What job have I hired this grudge to do?” REST Discover the art of doing nothing. Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow. Break down essential work into three sessions of no more than ninety minutes each. Take an...

Part II: Effortless Action What is Effortless Action? Effortless Action means accomplishing more by trying less. You stop procrastinating and take the first obvious step. You arrive at the point of completion without overthinking. You make progress by pacing yourself rather than powering through. You overachieve without overexerting. DEFINE To get started on an essential project, first define what “done” looks like. Establish clear conditions for completion, get there, then stop. Take sixty seconds to focus on your desired outcome. Write a “Done for the Day” list. Limit it to items that would constitute meaningful progress. START Make the first action the most obvious one. Break the first obvious action down into the tiniest, concrete step. Then name it. Gain maximum learning from minimal viable effort. Start with a ten-minute microburst of focused activity to boost motivation and energy. SIMPLIFY To simplify the process, don’t simplify the steps: simply remove them. Recognize that not everything requires you to go the extra mile. Maximize the steps not taken. Measure progress in the tiniest of increments. PROGRESS When you start a project, start with rubbish. Adopt a “zero-draft” approach and just put some words, any words, on the page. Fail cheaply: make learning-sized mistakes. Protect your progress from the harsh critic in your head. PACE Set an effortless pace: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Reject the false economy of “powering through.” Create the right range: I wi...

When you build a unified team where everybody knows who is doing what, it becomes easier to stay aligned on roles, responsibilities, regulations, rewards, and desired results.

principles are like the building blocks of knowledge: once you understand them correctly you can apply them hundreds of times.

Learning the right thing once is a bargain. A one-time investment of energy up front yields Effortless Results again and again over time.

“mirrored reciprocation,” or, in simpler terms, “You get what you give.”

“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.” In other words, when we have the solid fundamentals of knowledge, we have somewhere to hang the additional information we learn. We can anchor it in the mental models we already understand.

Learning something new is often a series of attempts, failures, and adjustments. Neural connections that result in success are reinforced and grow stronger. Like a tree that can support the growth of new branches as it grows thicker and stronger, our brains can now grow connections, incorporating that new information into our existing foundation of knowledge. Meanwhile, unproductive connections eventually become weaker and, like dead branches, break off.

by combining learnings from a range of disciplines—psychology, history, mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, and more—we produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Munger sees isolated facts as useless unless they “hang together on a latticework of theory.”

“believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out.”

The exchange of ideas across disciplines breeds novelty. And turning the conventional into something novel is often the key to effortless creativity—not

The typical American reads (or partially reads) only four books a year. More than a quarter of Americans don’t read books at all. And this trend is worsening. Reading a book is among the most high-leverage activities on earth.

absorbing yourself fully in a book changes who you are, just as if you had lived the experience yourself.

If you summarize the key learnings from a book you just read, you absorb it more deeply. The process of summarizing, of distilling ideas to their essential essence, helps us turn information into understanding, and understanding into unique knowledge.

Being good at what nobody is doing is better than being great at what everyone is doing. But being an expert in something nobody is doing is exponentially more valuable.

Knowledge may open the door to an opportunity, but unique knowledge produces perpetual opportunities.

These messages should be not just easy to understand but also hard to misunderstand. A. G. Lafley, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, called this the “Sesame Street Simple” rule. Don’t go for the overly sophisticated message. Don’t go for the one that makes you sound smart. Go for the straightforward message that can be easily understood and repeated.

Make the most essential things the easiest ones to teach and the easiest ones to learn.

AUTOMATE Do It Once and Never Again

It’s tempting to say, “If only the medical staff had been thinking….” But I see it as “If only the medical staff had not needed to think….”

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them”—another way of saying, “As many essential steps and activities as possible should be automated.”

author Dr. Atul Gawande explains in his book The Checklist Manifesto,

Extreme complexity only increases the cognitive load, making us that much more prone to errors.

what we need is not more knowledge but new skills and strategies that allow us to apply that knowledge without taxing our working memory.

we need a strategy “that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up f...

The checklist isn’t just useful for highly specialized tasks like flying an airplane. As the world gets more complex, we all need tools to help us remember what’s important.

A cheat sheet is one of the most effective, albeit low-tech, tools we have at our disposal to automate almost anything that really matters.

Essential Domains: Your health Effortless Automation: Schedule your annual physical as a recurring appointment on the same day each year, and your dentist appointments on the same day every six months. Sign up for regular delivery and automated payment of your recurring medicines from your pharmacy. Set your phone to turn on “nightlight” mode two hours before bedtime.

Essential Domains: Your relationships Effortless Automation: Set up regular calls or get-togethers with the people who matter most. Set calendar reminders for friend and family member birthdays. Preorder flowers or gifts to be sent on key birthdays, anniversaries, or other annual events.

Essential Domains: Your finances Effortless Automation: Have a percentage of your paycheck automatically deposited in savings each month. Schedule a weekly meeting to review your finances as a family, and annual meetings with a financial adviser. Automate budgeting with an app that tracks your spending. Set up regular monthly or annual donations to your most valued charities.

Essential Domains: Your home Effortless Automation: Subscribe for regular online purchases of key items for the home. Create an annual safety checklist for things like smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. Set up recurring shopping lists in a grocery store app. Delegate meal planning to an app based on your health goals.

Essential Domains: Your career Effortless Automation: Schedule recurring meetings with a mentor. Schedule an hour every quarter to review your personal career goals. Block off five minutes every morning to read an article on an important topic not directly related to your job.

Essential Domains: Your fun Effortless Automation Block off one hour each day for something that brings you joy.

One caveat is important to make at this juncture: automation can work for you or against you. If nonessential activities are automated, they too continue to happen without you thinking about it.

Consider taking the high-tech, low-effort path for the essential, and the low-tech, high-effort path for the nonessential.

You can’t have a high-performing team without high levels of trust.

The key to getting Effortless Results in and across teams is to have systems in place to ensure that the engine is constantly well oiled.

The best way to leverage trust to get residual results is simply to select trustworthy people to be around.

Warren Buffett uses three criteria for determining who is trustworthy enough to hire or to do business with. He looks for people with integrity, intelligence, and initiative, though he adds that without the first, the other two can backfire.

executive coach Kim Scott writes in her bestselling book Radical Candor,

But while hiring quickly may lighten the load at first, hiring well will lighten the load consistently and repeatedly, saving you many more headaches in the long run.

Every relationship has a structure, even if it’s an unspoken, unclear one. A low-trust structure is one where expectations are unclear, where goals are incompatible or at odds, where people don’t know who is doing what, where the rules are ambiguous and nobody knows what the standards for success are, and where the priorities are unclear and the incentives misaligned. A high-trust structure is one where expectations are clear. Goals are shared, roles are clearly delineated, the rules and standards are articulated, and the right results are prioritized, incentivized, and rewarded—consistently, not just sometimes.

the long tail of time management. When we invest our time in actions with a long tail, we continue to reap the benefits over a long period.

To break this habit, ask yourself: What is a problem that irritates me repeatedly? What is the total cost of managing that over several years? What is the next step I can take immediately, in a few minutes, to move toward solving it? The goal is to find the most annoying thing that can be solved in the least amount of time.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” When we’re merely managing a problem, we’re hacking at the branches. To prevent the problem before it even arises, we should strike at the root.

Just as you can find small actions to make your life easier in the future, you can look for small actions that will prevent your life from becoming more complicated. This principle applies in every type of endeavor.

Mistakes are dominoes: they have a cascading effect. When we strike at the root by catching our mistakes before they can do any damage, we don’t just prevent that first domino from toppling, we prevent the entire chain reaction.

Part I: Effortless State What is the Effortless State? The Effortless State is an experience many of us have had when we are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energized. You are completely aware, alert, present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in this moment. You are able to focus on what matters most with ease. INVERT Instead of asking, “Why is this so hard?,” invert the question by asking, “What if this could be easy?” Challenge the assumption that the “right” way is, inevitably, the harder one. Make the impossible possible by finding an indirect approach. When faced with work that feels overwhelming, ask, “How am I making this harder than it needs to be?” ENJOY Pair the most essential activities with the most enjoyable ones. Accept that work and play can co-exist. Turn tedious tasks into meaningful rituals. Allow laughter and fun to lighten more of your moments. RELEASE Let go of emotional burdens you don’t need to keep carrying. Remember: When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack. Use this habit recipe: “Each time I complain I will say something I am thankful for.” Relieve a grudge of its duties by asking, “What job have I hired this grudge to do?” REST Discover the art of doing nothing. Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow. Break down essential work into three sessions of no more than ninety minutes each. Take an effortless nap. NOTIC...