The Power of less – Why Less is Powerful

The power of less is a book by Leo Babauta. This book is full of good stuff.

Chapter 1 is about “Why Less is powerfull”.

Chapter  main idea :

Less is Powerful because if you do less, you have to focus on the essential

At work, or at home, you have many things to deal with.
If you focus on the essential, you’ll put the best chances to achieve it, instead of loosing yourself.

You can apply this to :

• your action list : start with the one that are really essential
• your projects : focus on the 3 more important
• the internet websites you read 
• your goals : identify the things you really want to achieve
• your emails : just check email twice a day, do not try to read all of them
• and so on …

Here’s a quote from the book :

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

Leo Babauta

If you want to read the full story, you can buy the paper or kindle version of the book here : Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential

My experience with ZTD : let’s start

Last week-end I’ve read the book “Zen To done” by Leo Babauta.

Zen To Done (ZTD) is “The Ultimate Simple Productivity System”.

I’ll not describe ZTD here, for more details please go to Leo’s website to read a summary, or better, buy and read the book (I highly recommend it).

One main idea of ZTD is to be pragmatic and to change your habbits one by one.

I’m already a GTD user since few years, so I’ve already implemented some concepts described in ZTD (collect, process using the 2 minutes rule, …) but I also face the “classical” GTD issues : too many actions, a complicated system to follow them (using the very good application nirvanahq) and a lot of difficulties to do the weekly review.

I’ve decided to do an experiement and to try to implement ZTD concepts and see how it can help me.

The first stage I’ll try  is to implement the habit of defining every morning the 3 MITs (Most Important Topics) that I want to adress during the day (and I commit to myself to …).

As a start, I’ve also drastically simplified my nirvanahq usage : I’ve removed all my projects, and put all the actions in 1 single list.

I started this last Monday (January 16th).

Every week I’ll give here a status of the experiment.