I’m alive

Clearly, I haven’t been following the schedule for the past couple of months. The reason is that I ended up starting a new job, moving from Singapore to Tokyo, and restarting study of Japanese. All of which have kept me pretty occupied, and will continue to do so for some more months. I’d love to write more about it, but it’s low on my priority list (thank you, Essentialism) so it’s a no for now.

However, I would like to keep reading and summarizing here in a bare-minimum way, so I’ve blocked out 15 minutes of my mornings (just as suggested in the book) and that’s how I got today’s post in. I’ve found that even if this is fragmented, (1) it isn’t that hard to pick up where I left off because I am doing it daily, (2) it doesn’t cause any context switching with my day’s main task because I do it first thing in the morning, and (3) it helps me stick to the time-boxing and scoping because I know if I don’t finish it today, I’ll get to start again tomorrow. I’ve followed this for the notes writeup as well, which helped me limit its scope to what I could finish in 15m chunks.

Book Notes: I’ve decided to read at least one book per month(?) and post my notes here as a concrete deliverable. This is part of a habit I’d like to cultivate to read more books, academic papers, and industry blogs.

Next book: TBD

Summary

The book: MCKEOWN, GREG. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. S.l.: VIRGIN BOOKS, 2021. Print.

“Less but better”. Minimalism for activities. Less is more. Seems to draw inspiration from minimalism, Covey’s 7 Habits, Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, Kondo, etc.

Outline: The path = Essence, Explore, Eliminate, Execute

  1. Essence: Have the mindset. Choose, Discern, Trade-Off.
    1. Choose: Remember that you do have a choice. Or else, your environment will choose for you.
    2. Discern: Most things are 80/20.
    3. Trade-off: You can’t do it all. Say no to good options, so you can focus on the best option.
  2. Explore: Identify all the options. Escape, Look, Play, Sleep, Select.
    1. Escape: First, create space. E.g. no-meeting-days, Gates’ Thinking Week, Jeff Weiner’s 2h thinking blocks, etc. Tip: 20m/day morning reading.
    2. Look: See the real point, e.g. “all teachers at conference” = “student’s day off”. Tip: Keep a journal and review it every quarter.
    3. Play: Play lowers stress and improves cognition. Tip: Remember your childhood play memories and try to re-create the same feeling.
    4. Sleep: Successful people do it, and so should you! Study: The best violinists practiced more, but also slept more, 8.6h on avg.
    5. Select: For outbound, use the 90% rule (no less than 90% on #1 criteria). For inbound, reject if under 3/3 minimum criteria + 2/3 extreme criteria. E.g. hiring at Visoe Shelving, Box = “could this have been a founding member?” Metaphor: searching for “best pizza in Brooklyn” instead of just “good resto in NYC”.
  3. Eliminate: Remove the noise. Clarify, Dare, Uncommit, Edit, Limit.
    1. Clarify: Lack of clear goal => (a) playing politics or (b) trying to do everything. Tip: Ask “How will I know when I’m done?”
    2. Dare: Say no in the first place. Rosa Parks, Covey choosing date night with his daughter over an old friend, Drucker’s “graceful no” to Csikszentmihalyi.
    3. Uncommit: Say no after you’ve started. Don’t finish the Concorde. Avoid the sunk cost and endowment biases. Get over fear of waste. Tips: Get a 2nd opinion. Use zero-based budgeting. Do a “reverse pilot”.
    4. Edit: Jack Dorsey, Chief Editing Officer. “Kill your darlings” per Stephen King. Decide = “kill options”. “The best surgeon is not the one who makes the most incisions”
    5. Limit: Don’t rob people of their problems. Don’t water their lawn. Tips: Put up fences. Take note when you feel “put off” by others’ requests.
  4. Execute: Do it well. Buffer, Subtract, Progress, Flow, Focus, Be.
    1. Buffer: It helps with driving, and it helps with projects. Tips: Start on big projects early, even if just starting a doc. Add 50% to your time estimate, or imagine an anonymous opinion.
    2. Subtract: Like The Goal, don’t add capacity, remove the slowest hiker’s load.
    3. Progress: Celebrate small wins. Positive Tickets in Canada. Token system for limiting kids’ tv time. MVP (minimum viable progress), e.g. sharing an idea on Twitter before starting a book. Tip: Whenever you schedule a meeting, spend 15s to type the main objectives.
    4. Flow: Phelps and “Watching the Videotape.” Tips: Hardest thing first. Create a cue for it. You can mix up your routines by day-of-week.
    5. Focus: What’s most important right now? Other things may be important too, just later. Kairos vs Chronos.
    6. Be: It’s not easy, but it’s worth it at the end. Don’t let your tombstone say “they read email”.

Notes

Good Quotes:

“To attain knowledge add things every day. To obtain wisdom subtract things every day.” - Lao Tzu “Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.” - W. H. Auden

Liked:

Lots of concrete stories to help retention from interviews.

Disliked:

Isn’t this basically minimalism applied to one’s activities? If distinct, could have drawn a distinction up front to make transferring the idea faster. If same, just say so; nothing wrong with this. Wish there were more mnemonics and more polish on how to make the information stick and help people get started. E.g., Atomic Habit’s worksheets. Information could have been organized a bit more.