What We’re All Looking For: The Art of Limiting Oneself Only to What’s Necessary

How many responsibilities and duties do you have? Emails you have to answer, your family, a house you need to clean, and many more responsibilities… Sometimes these seemingly small things fill almost our entire day. At the end of the day, we feel very tired. Author Thomas Oppong has written about how you can limit your life to only what is necessary. Let’s take a look together:

Many of us are in an endless stream of emails, notifications, meetings, and lots of responsibilities. We try harder every day. By the end of the day, we are extremely tired, and the next day, again, we start a new flow.

Information overload is killing our brains.

“Attitude is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Optimism is a choice. Kindness is a choice. Respect is a choice. Whatever choice you make makes you who you are. Choose wisely.” – Roy T. Bennett

For too long we have overemphasized the outer aspect of our choices (our choices) and underemphasized our inner ability to choose (our actions). When you don’t make deliberate choices knowing where to focus your energy and time, other people will make choices for you. Before long, you will have overlooked everything that is meaningful and important to you.

You can either make informed choices on a daily basis or let other people’s agendas control what you do!

When you forget your ability to choose, you become helpless and become a function of other people’s choices. You give others not only power, but also the right to choose for you. Don’t give up on your right to choose what’s on your to-do list for the day, week, or month.

“It doesn’t take a lot of strength to do something, but it takes a lot of strength to decide what to do.” – Elbert Hubbard

People tend to make worse decisions after making many decisions. Psychologists call this “decision fatigue”: The more choices you have to make, the worse the quality of your decisions becomes. By some estimates, the average adult makes 35,000 decisions a day. You read that right. No wonder you’re tired. After a long decision-making session earlier in the day, the quality of your decisions drops in the second half of the day when you want to be really active and do your best work.

Remember the 80/20 Rule

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Pareto principle , also known as the 80/20 rule: focus on the few things that work best for you. The principle states that for many events, approximately 80% of the effects are due to 20% of the causes.

It’s likely that you’re burdened with too much each workday and you’re too busy taking a moment to balance and identify what’s important and what’s urgent. When you force yourself to focus on core tasks with a great return on investment, you’ll be more productive, achieve more, and simplify your life in the process.

To effectively tackle less and achieve more, use:

Choose the three most important tasks for each day and focus on completing them within a set time. If you don’t do more than that, you may not be able to finish all the missions.

Success is a great source of motivation. By limiting yourself to a few things, you force yourself to focus only on the essential. Keep your to-do list short. Call it the “achievement list,” says Gary Keller.

Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list – a list intentionally built around extraordinary results.

“To-do lists tend to be long; achievement lists are short. One pulls you in all directions; the other targets you in a particular direction. One is a disorganized guide, the other an organized direction. If there’s no list built on success, then that’s not where it takes you.” If your to-do list includes everything, it probably takes you everywhere except where you really want to go.” – Gary Keller

The key to focusing on the essentials in life and work is to limit yourself to an arbitrary but small number of things. It is forcing yourself to focus on the important things and eliminate everything else. This is what we call being essentialist.

“Being essentialist means living by design, not by default. Rather than making reactive choices, the essentialist deliberately separates the few things that are vital from the unimportant majority. It removes the non-essentials and then removes the barriers so that there is a clear, smooth transition of the essentials. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach to identifying where our highest point of contribution lies, and then it makes applying those things almost effortless.” – Greg McKeown

When you do too many things at once, you constantly move from one task to the next. Your work is constantly interrupted. That’s why you’re always distracted. Do less. Eliminate distractions. Start today, choose what you think is most important. Free up some space and work on your attainable goals.

– do less
– Being disciplined
– Focus on one task
– End multitasking
– Giving up unnecessary commitments
– Schedule fewer meetings
– Saying no to requests
– Ignore notifications
– Limiting your daily to-do list
– Focusing on the most important tasks first
– Clarify your working hours
– Focusing on the things that make the most impact and letting go of the others

You can do this slowly, over time, and consciously. The result: you create more time for other things in your life. You have a more effective and less stressful relationship with your time.

You have time to do everything you need to do. The problem is that you feel the need to do too much with the time you have. Instead of doing more with side effects, it is necessary to do less for more effects.