Less Is More

One morning I walked out my front door to go to work (Yes I actually did have a job once) and I noticed my roses had been hacked back to stumps! I ran inside and told my wife our garden had been vandalized. As we stood out the front and looked at what once used to be a wonderful rose garden our next door neighbor stuck his head over the fence and told us he had ‘trimmed’ our garden for us.

Trimmed? Are you serious, there is nothing left…

It turned out our Italian neighbor ws a professional landscape gardener and he told us that the best way to grow amzazing roses was to cut them right back to the stump so that all the energy and vitality of the rose could be dedicated to growing beautiful new roses instead of being wasted on the dead branches and old buds.

The next season our roses were incredible!

Since learning this lesson I have realized you can apply the same to business, friendships and how you arrange your time. When you trim dead wood and cut back on expired resources you give more attention and energy to the developing assets.

Less is more.

I don’t wait until January to prune back and de-clutter. I do it all the time. I do what I call a ‘Powercut’ and start eliminating everything I do not need. Here are some ideas:

• remove ToDo items
• delete contacts from phone
• cancel appointments you are not looking forward to
• stop recurring services you no longer use
• shred paperwork and dump it
• take a trailor load of rubbish to the tip
• donate unused clothes and toys to charity
• purge your inbox and unsubscribe to ‘gurus’
• declutter your office
• remove excess furniture
• clear whiteboards
• sell assets you no longer use
• empty your wallet
• clean out your glovebox
• tidy the house
• turn skype off
• avoid people who waste your time or mess your  mind
• delete files on your hard drive
• clear the cache on your computer
• uninstall apps you no longer use
• Sell businesses you have built
• delete browser bookmarks
• clean up your desktop icons
• empty the bins
• give away books or courses you have used

Empty your brain into a ‘later’ file

When I have ideas, meetings, conversations, notes etc.. I empty my thoughts into an application called evernote using the ‘fastever’ app and Siri and then I can let go of the information for now. I can retrieve it when I need it using the handy search feature. A clear mind is super powerful. In fact I avoid writing down anything I will never need again. Excessive note taking will slow your system up later so be frugal with notes.

NO is your friend

Saying NO to opportunities by filtering them against your overall strategy is the key to stopping excess creeping back in. Keep it lean, run things like you mean it and enjoy the productivity boost for the things you say YES to!

Comments welcome below

Tagged as: filtering, james schramko, less is more, manage time, no, things, zen living