This post is part 4 of a series of posts, discussing some lessons in my 3-week long exploration of Skillshare courses. The summary of the lessons learnt can be found here.

This is going to be my last course review for a while, since it is the final week of the June holidays. While I return to work, I am going to examine my routines to see how I can continue this writing habit.

  1. Who is the creator?
  2. Resources
  3. How did this change my life?
  4. Lesson 1: Only a few things really matter, and it is our responsibility to decide what they are
  5. Lesson 2: Say yes slowly, and say no very fast, because what ever we say ‘yes’ takes away time and energy from what is essential to us.
  6. Lesson 3: Make the essential easier by building routines and systems

Who is the creator?

Greg McKeown is the author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. He advocates us to challenge our definitions of success, and work toward maximising its key levers.

Resources

  1. His Skillshare class
  2. His book: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
  3. His personal website

How did this change my life?

  • This led me to streamline my journaling process, which I have stopped for a while now. I have deliberately set it up in Notion so I can access my journal from the pages I most frequently enter.

Lesson 1: Only a few things really matter, and it is our responsibility to decide what they are

We need to have agency in what we prioritise. This means that we choose to invest the majority of our time and energy into pursuits that we select. It’s not possible to get everything we want done, so we need to decide which.

….it’s clear in hindsight that I made a fool’s bargain, that I violated something more important for something less important, and what I learned with the simplest of lessons, which is this, if you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.

This means taking sure to allocate time for the big rocks such as personal health and family. The blurred boundaries in a remote work setting can mislead us into spending all our time at work.

Lesson 2: Say yes slowly, and say no very fast, because what ever we say ‘yes’ takes away time and energy from what is essential to us.

We typically agree very quickly to what people ask of us, and deny ourselves of what satisfies us. We need to flip that order, and instead pause before committing to any new projects.

….as soon as you realize you can’t do it all, you realize you’re making trade-offs every day, every decision you make, every time you say yes, you’re saying no to something else.

Something we already know, is we have only limited time and energy in the day. If we have deliberately chosen what to focus, picking up new issues to put on our plate means we need to take something off the plate.

Examples of this in action:

  • Thinking carefully about potential projects and thinking what to give up to adopt them.
  • Taking time to consider with “Let me check my calendar, and I will get back to you.”

Lesson 3: Make the essential easier by building routines and systems

How we become truly effective is through performing it consistently. To develop the consistency, we need some deliberate thinking to routinise our essential habits, removing the activation energy from taking action.

The idea is to do it consistently. The consistency is where the power is, because you just do a little bit until it becomes habitual, and so then you can keep on doing it for years and years.

Examples where this is implemented:

  • Jerry Seinfeld’s calendar, where he put a cross on every day he completed his writing task. Not continuing the habit then breaks the chain.
  • Starting habits small to build their consistency of execution. e.g. journalling one sentence a day, doing one push-up every time a trigger occurs.