Do More with Less
Hack your day and learn strategies that can help you accomplish more things with less!
Have you ever tried writing your to-do list sincerely hoping that you’ll be able to accomplish them by EOD the next day?
Every night before I go to bed, I list down the things I want to accomplish the next day. One bad habit of mine is listing down 10–20 items hoping that everything will go according to my plan. But, more often than not, I only achieve close to half of my to-do list for a day.
The same thing almost always happens every day because I often forget how to focus. I did not know how to prioritize the essential and most important things in a day. 24 hours in a day is very limited because almost ⅓ of this is allotted for our sleeping and resting time and another ⅓ for our eating and prepping time. If you’re someone who has more than one commitment for a day, 8–10 hours will never be enough, so, the key is setting your priority.
Fortunately, I chanced upon Greg McKeown’s online course on Essentialism via Skillshare. In a nutshell, “essentialism” is doing more of the right stuff by exploring your priorities, eliminating non-essentials, and executing a personal system.
What are your ‘negotiables’ and ‘non-negotiables’? No right or wrong answers here because only you know what is essential in your life.
As McKeown emphasized, we have a lot on our plate — ideas, tasks, projects, etc, but we have limited resources (may it be time or money) so we must focus on the few things that would make the biggest and best impact on our lives. Remember that we can only do so much at the end of the day and we do not have to do everything that everyone else’s doing!
If you’re someone who always overcommits or underestimates the tasks at hand, here are the few things you can practice:
1. Go back to your ‘north star.’ What is your why in doing the things that you do?
2. Start decluttering. Declutter your mind, schedule, calendar, and to-do lists.
3. Give space to focus on what is essential. Decide where you need to place your focus.
4. Remove distractions and the non-essential. As Greg McKeown advised, “Make it easy to do what is essential and hard to do what is non-essential.”
5. Focus on the essential things by routinizing your tasks, creating visual cues, and building triggers in your everyday life.
Instead of going with the flow, we can start to be more proactive in controlling our day-to-day lives. We all have choices to make and that starts now!
PS. If you want to avail one-month free trial in Skillshare, you may use this link: https://skl.sh/2ZQ0PnM.😉
