We are unprepared in part because, for the first time, the preponderance

of choice has overwhelmed our ability to manage it. We have lost our
ability to filter what is important and what isn’t.
 Psychologists call this “decision fatigue”: the more choices we are forced
to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.5

TOO MUCH SOCIAL PRESSURE

It is not just the number of choices that has increased exponentially, it is

also the strength and number of outside influences on our decisions that
has increased. While much has been said and written about how
hyperconnected we now are and how distracting this information
overload can be, the larger issue is how our connectedness has increased
the strength of social pressure. Today, technology has lowered the barrier
for others to share their opinion about what we should be focusing on. It
is not just information overload; it is opinion overload.

THE IDEA THAT “YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL”

The idea that we can have it all and do it all is not new. This myth has
been peddled for so long, I believe virtually everyone alive today is
infected with it. It is sold in advertising. It is championed in corporations.
It is embedded in job descriptions that provide huge lists of required skills
and experience as standard. It is embedded in university applications that
require dozens of extracurricular activities.
What is new is how especially damaging this myth is today, in a time
when choice and expectations have increased exponentially. It results in
stressed people trying to cram yet more activities into their already
overscheduled lives. It creates corporate environments that talk about
work/life balance but still expect their employees to be on their smart
phones 24/7/365. It leads to staff meetings where as many as ten “top
priorities” are discussed with no sense of irony at all.
The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was
singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the
next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and
start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing
the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have
multiple “first” things. People and companies routinely try to do just that.
One leader told me of his experience in a company that talked
of “Pri-1, Pri-2, Pri-3, Pri-4, and Pri-5.” This gave the impression of many
things being the priority but actually meant nothing was.
But when we try to do it all and have it all, we find ourselves making
trade-offs at the margins that we would never take on as our intentional
strategy. When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to
focus our energies and time, other people—our bosses, our colleagues,
our clients, and even our families—will choose for us, and before long
we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important. We
can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas
to control our lives.
Once an Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware, who cared for people
in the last twelve weeks of their lives, recorded their most often discussed
regrets. At the top of the list: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true
to myself, not the life others expected of me.”6
This requires, not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully,
deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials, and not just
getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but cutting out some really good
opportunities as well.7 Instead of reacting to the social pressures pulling
you to go in a million directions, you will learn a way to reduce, simplify,
and focus on what is absolutely essential by eliminating everything else.
You can think of this book doing for your life and career what a
professional organizer can do for your closet. Think about what happens
to your closet when you never organize it. Does it stay neat and tidy with
just those few outfits you love to wear hanging on the rack? Of course
not. When you make no conscious effort to keep it organized, the closet
becomes cluttered and stuffed with clothes you rarely wear. Every so
often it gets so out of control you try and purge the closet. But unless you
have a disciplined system you’ll either end up with as many clothes as
you started with because you can’t decide which to give away; end up
with regrets because you accidentally gave away clothes you do wear and
did want to keep; or end up with a pile of clothes you don’t want to keep
but never actually get rid of because you’re not quite sure where to take
them or what to do with them.
In the same way that our closets get cluttered as clothes we never wear
accumulate, so do our lives get cluttered as well-intended commitments
and activities we’ve said yes to pile up. Most of these
efforts didn’t come with an expiration date. Unless we have a system for
purging them, once adopted, they live on in perpetuity.
Here’s how an Essentialist would approach that closet.

1. EXPLORE AND EVALUATE

Instead of asking, “Is there a chance I will wear this someday in the
future?” you ask more disciplined, tough questions: “Do I love this?” and
“Do I look great in it?” and “Do I wear this often?” If the answer is no,
then you know it is a candidate for elimination.
In your personal or professional life, the equivalent of asking yourself
which clothes you love is asking yourself, “Will this activity or effort
make the highest possible contribution toward my goal?” Part One of this
book will help you figure out what those activities are.

2. ELIMINATE

Let’s say you have your clothes divided into piles of “must keep” and
“probably should get rid of.” But are you really ready to stuff the
“probably should get rid of” pile in a bag and send it off? After all, there
is still a feeling of sunk-cost bias: studies have found that we tend to value
things we already own more highly than they are worth and thus that we
find them more difficult to get rid of. If you’re not quite there, ask the
killer question: “If I didn’t already own this, how much would I spend to
buy it?” This usually does the trick.
In other words, it’s not enough to simply determine which activities
and efforts don’t make the highest possible contribution; you still have to
actively eliminate those that do not. Part Two of this book will show you
how to eliminate the nonessentials, and not only that, how do it in a way
that garners you respect from colleagues, bosses, clients, and peers.

3. EXECUTE

If you want your closet to stay tidy, you need a regular routine for
organizing it. You need one large bag for items you need to throw away
and a very small pile for items you want to keep. You need to know the
dropoff location and hours of your local thrift store. You need to have a
scheduled time to go there.
In other words, once you’ve figured out which activities and efforts to
keep—the ones that make your highest level of contribution—you need a
system to make executing your intentions as effortless as possible. In this
book you’ll learn to create a process that makes getting the essential
things done as effortless as possible.

Of course, our lives aren’t static like the clothes in our closet. Our clothes
stay where they are once we leave them in the morning (unless we have
teenagers!). But in the closet of our lives, new clothes—new demands on
our time—are coming at us constantly. Imagine if every time you opened
the doors to your closet you found that people had been shoving their
clothes in there—if every day you cleaned it out in the morning and then
by afternoon found it already stuffed to the brim. Unfortunately, most of
our lives are much like this. How many times have you started your
workday with a schedule and by 10:00 A.M. you were already completely
off track or behind? Or how many times have you written a “to do” list in
the morning but then found that by 5:00 P.M. the list was even longer?
How many times have you looked forward to a quiet weekend at home
with the family then found that by Saturday morning you were inundated
with errands and play dates and unforeseen calamities? But here’s the
good news: there is a way out.
Essentialism is about creating a system for handling the closet of our
lives. This is not a process you undertake once a year, once a month, or
even once a week, like organizing your closet. It is a discipline you apply
each and every time you are faced with a decision about whether to say
yes or whether to politely decline. It’s a method for making the tough
trade-off between lots of good things and a few really great things. It’s
about learning how to do less but better so you can achieve the highest
possible return on every precious moment of your life.
This book will show you how to live a life true to yourself, not the life
others expect from you. It will teach you a method for being more
efficient, productive, and effective in both personal and professional
realms. It will teach you a systematic way to discern what is important,
eliminate what is not, and make doing the essential as effortless as
possible. In short, it will teach you how to apply the disciplined
pursuit of less to every area of your life. Here’s how.