How to Eliminate the Non-Essentials in Your Life

Idea

These days people are stretched too thin, at work and at home. We’re busy but not productive and it really gets in the way of being able to break through to the next level in our career.

Action

This is a specific tool that I recommend for eliminating nonessentials:

1. Get a piece of paper and a pen (or anything you can write and record with).
2. Write down something that is 90% or above for you on the importance scale. Something that’s very important and essential, but that you’re under-investing in right now.
3. Write down a second item, which is something that you know is not important, a 0-10% on the importance scale, but that you’re over-investing in and still spending time on anyway.

Then the idea is to trade these things off. Start doing the item you’ve identified as essential and stop doing the thing you identified as nonessential.

In order to do that, you need to also write down:

4. How can you stack the decks in your favor? How can you make is so that you can execute this tradeoff between these two things as easily as possible?
5. Write down a name of someone who can hold you accountable. Someone who you can talk to and involve, so that you’ll make more progress in the item you’ve identified as essential, and eliminate the item you found non-essential.

There’s more to this, but this is the place to begin.