The Power Of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential

by Leo Babauta

The solution lies in setting limits to how much we consume and do. It lies in making the most of our time by focusing on the most important things, instead of everything.

Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest.

It’s a matter of placing limits, and focusing on the essential.

It’s about limitations rather than volume.

Principle 1: By setting limitations, we must choose the essential. So in everything you do, learn to set limitations.

Principle 2: By choosing the essential, we create great impact with minimal resources. Always choose the essential to maximize your time and energy.

Examine your task list. Take a look at everything on your list and ask yourself the following questions about each one: Will this have an impact that will last beyond this week or this month? How will it change my job, my career, my life? How will this further a long-term goal of mine? How important is that goal?

If there’s any area of your life that is overwhelming you, and that you’d like to simplify, apply limitations.

Analyze your current usage levels (how many times do you do something a day?) and pick a lower limit based on what you think would be ideal. Test it out for about a week, and then analyze whether that’s working for you. If it doesn’t work, adjust to a new level you think might work better, and test that out for about a week. Continue to adjust until you find the right level and until you make it a habit.

CHOOSING THE ESSENTIAL: A SERIES OF QUESTIONS

The key is to take a few moments (or hours, or days, if necessary) to stop what you’re doing and think about it in a broader perspective. Are you focusing on the essentials? What are the

If you align your spending with your goals and values, you’ll eliminate a lot of nonessential spending, and your finances will be better off.

Simplifying isn’t meant to leave your life empty—it’s meant to leave space in your life for what you really want to do. Know what those things are before you start simplifying.

saying “no” is simply a commitment to sticking to the essentials.

Focus is your most important tool in becoming more effective.

Make anything you do become practice.

Write down your plan. You will need to specifically state what your goal will be each day, when you’ll do it, what your “trigger” will be (the event that will immediately precede the habit that’s already a part of your routine—such as exercising right after you brush your teeth), and who you will report to (see below).

12 KEY HABITS TO START WITH

Choose something so small that success is almost guaranteed. Sure, a small success is not as satisfying as a big success, but it’s only small in the short term.

Why not have just one project? If limiting yourself to three projects makes you more effective, why not limit yourself to one project to make yourself even more effective? You’d think this would be logical, especially as I recommended having just One Goal. However, the reality is that almost every project is held up as you wait for information, for other people to get back to you, for others to complete tasks, for vendors or clients to do something. It’s rare that you can start a project and work on it until it’s finished, without any waiting. If this is possible, I suggest you do exactly that: Start a project and don’t work on anything else until the project is completed.

the value of having three rather than one primary project.

Unfortunately, that’s often not the case: We must wait for tasks or information or other things to be completed before we can move on to the next step. And so we multitask, but not on the task level—we multitask only on the project level. While one project is on hold for an hour or a day or a few days, we can be working on another. I’ve found that three projects works best for this type of project-level multitasking—any more than three, and you begin to lose effectiveness. For this system to work, a project should take no more than a month to complete, and preferably only a week or two. If a project takes a year to complete (for example), then you will not be able to work on any other projects for a year. That’s too long to put the rest of your life on hold. Instead, break long-term projects into smaller projects that can be completed in a month or less. If you want to launch a magazine, for example, focus first on the project of coming up with a design, then on putting together a team, then on finding financial backing, and so on.