Essentialism

Essentialism is the disciplined pursuit of less. Stop trying to do everything, figure out what actually matters, go all in.

The book is longer than it needs to be. Ironic, given the subject matter. These are my condensed notes — the essentials of Essentialism.

Less but better

Weniger aber besser. That’s the motto, borrowed from designer Dieter Rams. Stop making a millimeter of progress in a million directions. Pick the things that matter, commit, and generate momentum.

McKeown tells the story of a CEO who used to say yes to everything. His turning point was a single question: “Is this the very most important thing I should be doing with my time and resources right now?”
If it isn’t a clear yes, it’s a no. The quality of his work went back up. Instead of inching forward on everything, he started making actual progress on the things that mattered.

The word “priority” was singular for five hundred years. It entered English in the 1400s meaning the first thing. We only pluralized it in the 1900s, somehow convincing ourselves we could have multiple “first” things. We can’t.

Essentialism isn’t something you practice once in a while. It’s continuous. You’re constantly pausing to ask whether you’re investing in the right activities.

And when you do practice it, you get to live by design instead of by default. Everything you do (and don’t do) becomes a conscious decision. You become the system designer, ensuring the essential can flow without interruption.

This is radical prioritization and “do less, better” in book form.

You get to choose

The essentialist replaces three false assumptions with three core truths: “I choose to,” “Only a few things really matter,” and “I can do anything but not everything.” You get to choose. So pick what matters, and only a few things do. You can pick any of them, but not all.

The essentialist says “I choose to,” not “I have to.” You can call this naive. You have to eat, sleep, breathe. But technically those are choices — the consequences of not doing them are just so severe we don’t consider the alternative. The point is to remember you always hold the power.

When we forfeit our right to choose, someone else will choose for us. Lead or be led.

The ability to choose cannot be taken away or even given away—it can only be forgotten.

When McKeown was trying to do everything at once, he wasn’t failing at any one thing, but he wasn’t succeeding at anything either.

The vital few

Most things are worthless. A very small number are exceptionally valuable. This is the Pareto Principle applied to everything.

Most things are 0.1x value. Some are 1x. Less so are 10x. Very few are 100x, 1000x, or 10,000x. Nonessentialists think everything is of high value, that everything is both urgent and important. Not so.

You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.
— John Maxwell

An essentialist explores many options to find the 20%. Even better, the 1%, or the 0.01%. The extra effort is worth it because the best opportunities repay the investment manifold.

This connects to what Naval Ravikant said about working like a lion. Only “work” when you find a worthy pursuit, then go all in. Some actions lead to wildly disproportionate returns. Those are the high leverage actions. Those are the ones you chase.

Working hard matters. But direction is often more important than speed. Spend your time on the maximum-value work rather than brute-forcing through low-value grunt work.

Nonessentialists say yes by default. We’re too primed to say yes to everything, and in turn, we never have time for ourselves. We hardly move the needle on what matters.

For selection, try scoring every option from 0 to 100. Anything below 90 becomes a 0. Reject it. This stops you from getting stuck with the 60s and 70s. Think about how you’d feel scoring a 65 on a test.
This is the same idea as Derek Sivers’s “hell yes or no.” Be ultra selective.

Trade-offs

Trade-offs are inherent. You can’t escape them.

Instead of asking “what do I have to give up?”, ask “what do I want to go big on?” That seems way more exciting.

One manager refused to make trade-offs and spread five projects’ worth of effort across seventeen. The results were predictable. You need to prioritize, and then choose what not to do. What you’re willing to sacrifice.

This echoes Four Thousand Weeks . We don’t have time for everything, so we have to make hard choices. And from Scrum : the more you try to take on, the less productive you are. Limit how much you do at once.

Explore before you commit

Exploring lots of options doesn’t mean committing to any of them. Essentialists explore broadly first so they pick the right thing later. Nonessentialists just react to whatever comes in next.

Essentialists spend as much time as possible exploring, listening, debating, questioning, and thinking. But exploration is not an end in itself. The purpose is to discern the vital few from the trivial many. You spend time thinking and exploring as a means to find the 20%.

Create space for this. Set aside time to think and just be. No email, phone, distractions. McKeown blocked 5 AM to 1 PM for deep work — no calls, no appointments, no interruptions. He called it “monk mode.”

When you make space to think, you explore a hundred questions and possibilities. Like how your eyes focus: not by staring at one point, but by constantly adjusting to the field of vision.

A few practices that help here:

• Keep a journal
• Go see things for yourself instead of relying on secondhand accounts
• Watch for abnormal or unusual details
• Clarify the question — what are you really looking for?

Protect the asset

You are the asset. Take care of yourself, or nothing else matters.

The goal is to do it continuously. To find a way to stay in the game. That means taking GREAT care of your health. Especially sleep. It’s not something you can compromise on.

One more hour of sleep buys several hours of higher productivity. You can forget calling yourself a hard worker if you consistently deprioritize sleep, exercise, or nutrition. Your productivity suffers, and you do much worse than you otherwise would have.

Even naps help. Research shows a single REM cycle can improve the integration of unassociated information. Deep sleep helps you make new connections. Maybe worth implementing mid-day naps.

Our highest priority is to protect our ability to prioritize.

Protect your ability to make good decisions. To prioritize. That means being disciplined about sleep, health, and fitness.

Essential intent

An essential intent is one decision that settles a thousand future ones. Like deciding to become a doctor instead of a lawyer — one choice eliminates a universe of options and maps the next decade.

It’s like memoizing an expensive algorithm. Once you’ve computed the hard decision, similar ones resolve instantly.

Tim Ferriss did this. He publicly announced he wouldn’t read books published after a certain year. One decision meant he never had to reject the endless stream of people asking him to read their book.

Choosing to acquire habits works the same way. Book readers need books to read. Runners need gear. The initial commitment cascades into future decisions.

When there’s clarity about what a team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people thrive. When there isn’t, they experience confusion, stress, and frustration.

Clarity matters at the personal level too. Have an essential intent for your personal life. Then any decision becomes easier: does it get me closer to or further from this goal?

A good essential intent is concrete and measurable. “Get everyone in the U.K. online by the end of 2012.” “Helping 1,000,000 aspiring entrepreneurs start their ecom businesses.”
You know what you’re doing and you know when you’re done. If you can’t tell when you’ve accomplished your essential intent, it’s not concrete enough.

Don’t obsess over wording. The substance matters. Ask yourself, “If we could be truly excellent at only one thing, what would it be?”

Saying no

Saying no takes courage. You don’t want to disappoint. You want to make others happy by accepting their requests. But saying no is essential, and that’s exactly why it takes courage. It’s hard.

Separate the decision from the relationship. When people ask us to do something, we confuse the request with how we feel about them. Sometimes they seem so interconnected that we forget denying the request is not the same as denying the person. Only once you separate the two can you make a clear decision and then find the courage to communicate it.

Once you start, you find that your fears were exaggerated. People actually respect and admire those with the conviction to say no.

Letting go

The sunk cost fallacy keeps you investing in losing propositions because you’ve already sunk costs you can’t recoup.
It easily becomes a vicious cycle: the more you invest, the more determined you become to see it pay off. The more you invest, the harder it is to let go.

We also overvalue what we already have. Think of a book on your shelf you haven’t read in years, or a kitchen appliance still in its box, or that sweater you got but never wore. The moment you think about giving something away, it suddenly seems more valuable.
That’s the endowment effect. It works on commitments and projects too, not just physical things.

Ask yourself what you’d do with the time or money you’d save from quitting a commitment. That can help you become free.

McKeown gives several strategies to break free.

Pretend you don’t own it. If you didn’t already have this opportunity, how much would you spend to acquire it?
For physical things: if you didn’t own this, how much would you pay to buy it? This usually cuts through the attachment.

Zero-based budgeting. In accounting, budgets normally start from last year’s numbers as a baseline. Zero-based budgeting throws that out. Every line item has to be justified from scratch.

Apply the same to your time. Don’t budget based on existing commitments. Start from zero. Every commitment has to justify itself anew, as if you had no history with it. Is it a justified cost?

Admit failure to begin success. Don’t drive in circles because you don’t want to admit you’re lost. The sooner you acknowledge a wrong turn, the sooner you can correct course.

Get over the fear of waste. We’re conditioned to avoid waste at all costs. It’s become too extreme and spills too far into our lives. We waste effort on bad projects because quitting feels wasteful.

Run a reverse pilot. Pick something you assume makes a big difference and quietly scale it back. If nobody notices, it probably wasn’t that important.

Don’t force a fit. Like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Tootsie, trying to be taller, shorter, different — forcing a mismatch always ends in bad compromises for both sides.

Watch for the status quo bias too. Continuing to do something simply because you’ve always done it.

Edit your life

Jack Dorsey thinks of the CEO role as chief editor of the company. There are a thousand things you could be doing, but only one or two that matter. Inputs flood in constantly from engineers, support, designers, all with opinions about what you should be doing. Most is noise. Get good at singling out the signal.

Good editing is deliberate subtraction that adds life. Via negativa, addition through subtraction. Skilful editing gives you more energy, makes you better, removes friction, makes things easier to do. It takes discipline and hard work.

Don’t feel the need to edit every single thing. The best editors sometimes have the discipline to leave things exactly as they are. The best surgeon is not the one who makes the most incisions.

Editing isn’t something you do once when things get overwhelming. If you wait too long, you’re forced to make major cuts not of your choosing. Editing continuously lets you make smaller, deliberate adjustments. A natural cadence.

Boundaries matter here. They’re like the walls of a sandcastle. Let one fall, and the rest come down.

Systems, buffers, and preparation

You need a system for doing the right things effortlessly. Once you’ve honed in on the essential and gotten rid of the nonessential, you need a system to keep it that way.

A big part of designing that system is accounting for off days. You won’t always have that superhuman motivation and drive, so it matters how you deal with the lows. What have you put in place to recover from an off day? How do you deal with it such that you get back to it?

Ideally, we’d never have an off day. Everything would be routine. But life is never like that. Far from every day will present ideal circumstances. As Ryan Holiday put it: how good are you if you need ideal conditions to perform?

Build buffers because things will go wrong. Essentialists prepare early. Extremely early. Preparing for retirement by saving from your first paycheck. Building a savings account to protect against random events — car accidents, unforeseen costs. These are buffers against the unexpected.

Jim Collins and Morten Hansen found that the most successful companies in extreme conditions weren’t better at predicting the future. They just acknowledged they couldn’t predict it and prepared better. They filtered 7 companies from 20,400.

Daniel Kahneman coined “the planning fallacy” in 1979 for our tendency to underestimate how long tasks take, even when we’ve done them before. Add 50% to your estimates.

Parkinson’s Law works in the other direction: work expands to fill the time allotted, like gas expanding to fill its container.

Use the good times to prepare for the bad.

Remove the constraint

Instead of piling on more effort, remove the obstacle slowing you down. This is the Theory of Constraints applied to your life. McKeown is basically applying The Five Focusing Steps.

You can’t know which constraints to fix before you know the goal of the system.
Know what the goal is first, then remove all impediments to progress.
Remove all things holding you back from multiplying throughput: what is keeping leverage down, leading to 1x returns only?

Before starting work on a goal, ask: what are all the obstacles between me and getting this done? Which one, if removed, would make the majority of others disappear? That’s your bottleneck.

Anything not advancing you towards the goal is a distraction, even if it’s productive in itself. That makes it more dangerous, because it’s easier to justify. If it matters enough, do it later.

And constraint removal isn’t just for when things are clogged. If they are, you’ve let them go too far. It’s an all-the-time thing. This maximizes your throughput.

This extends to routines. You don’t need to list obstacles before vacuuming. But if a routine task feels slightly annoying or you feel friction doing it, there are obstacles to remove.

A task can have obstacles even if it’s routine. That might mean making it more fun, or finding the 20% causing 80% of the annoyance.

Small wins and momentum

Instead of going for big, flashy wins that don’t matter, pursue small, simple wins in areas that are essential. Start small. The loftier your goals, the harder it is to get started. Just get the ball rolling, build momentum, keep going, and watch your results compound.

Amabile and Kramer studied hundreds of thousands of reflections and found that everyday progress — even a small win — is the single most important factor in how people feel and perform at work. Progress is the biggest motivator of all. Small wins are easier to achieve, you can rack them up faster, and they lead to progress, which motivates you further.

When you celebrate small wins, you reinforce the behavior. This is a core idea in the habits literature: celebrating makes you more likely to repeat. The habit sticks, you keep doing it, and the results compound.

Focus on minimal viable progress.
What’s the smallest amount of progress that’s useful and valuable?
What’s the smallest high-ROI thing you can do right now?