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The joy of missing out - Live more by doing less - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Productivity is not about doing more, it’s doing what’s most important. We need to stop trying to get more done and instead reset our focus on our own priorities. When we do that, our ideal lives can become our real, everyday lives.
    - - DISCOVERY: Because you are at the center—not the system—we begin by working together to discover your unique purpose and identify the priorities in your life. We will create a North Star to serve as your personal guide to help you make choices and begin to focus on what’s important.
      - CLARITY: Using what we discovered in step one, we will learn how to choose the projects and tasks that will have the most impact on your goals and priorities. We will create effective boundaries and learn an easy framework to help clarify what is important and what is not.
      - SIMPLICITY: Even while living a priority-centered life, you still have all those not-so-glamorous tasks to accomplish—from home chores to finances. We will work together to simplify these systems and design personalized processes to help both your work and home life run with less effort.
      - HARMONY: Now that we have discovered your purpose, clarified what’s important to you, and built a solid foundation of simplified systems to help things run smoothly, we will work to pull it all together and create harmony so you can begin living a life you love.
  - - - We falsely believe that if we are not busy, we are failing. In the pursuit of finding balance, we try to do everything, but the more we do, the less we succeed.
    - - Think about balance like riding a bike. A bike has the ability to move in a deliberate direction. It requires some equilibrium to stay upright, but have you ever tried to balance on a bike that’s perfectly still? It’s almost impossible. We have to lean forward a bit and start gathering momentum by pushing on the pedals. The energy we create keeps us from falling over.
      - Let’s explore this idea together and apply it to real life. While we are all different, our lives are made up of the same three buckets that need to be filled: work, home, and personal.
        
        WORK: This area is what we consider our job. This might be running your own business or working in a small office or for a Fortune 500 company. Our work doesn’t need to be tied to an income—it might be that your job is CEO of the Home because you are a stay-at-home parent or a student going to school.
        
        PERSONAL: This section of our lives is tied to relationships and interactions. This includes the connections we have with people like our significant others, our families, our friends, and the world around us. Our life goals, hobbies, and health all fall into this bucket because they are part of our relationship with ourselves.
        
        HOME: This area includes the tasks and projects that keep life running smoothly. While our personal bucket is about emotional needs, home is where our basic needs are met. This bucket includes chores and tasks like cleaning the house, running kids to activities, and keeping up with daily happenings. Home is an important bucket because it helps us feel safe and secure.
      - We all have three key resources available to share with the world—time, energy, and focus.
      - In chasing this illusion of balance, we end up creating a life that feels busy—not meaningful. We have to be willing to go out of balance. We need to be willing not to do everything. That’s the real magic.
    - - They fool themselves with their stories and conclude that life is an either/or situation.
        
        I can be a mom OR I can chase my dream of opening my business.
        
        I can be a career woman OR a hands-on parent.
        
        I can take care of my elderly parents OR pursue my art career.
  - - - I am lucky enough to get to live with these kids for the first 18 years. And if you look at it on the time map, you’ll see, in the grand scheme of things, that’s not very much. It’s less than 20 percent of their lives:
      - As much as I love them, I’m not planning on having them move back home after they become adults. I only have 18 years to soak up that time, to try and impart some values, and to give them a foundation to become independent adults.
      - Friday nights are important to me. I started out with 936 of these Friday nights :red_flag:
        
        Only 416, less than half, are left, and at this point they aren’t able to spend every Friday night with me because they have other things going on, like sleepovers, movies with friends, and so on.
      - The point I want you to focus on is that we are all lucky enough to be on this earth for a finite amount of time—it’s up to us to maximize that time and live our lives to the fullest. Living a life with our priorities guiding us is the key to a happy life—a life that feels well lived.
    - - Happiness is not a limited resource. You are not going to use it all up. If anything, it’s a resource that exponentially grows when it’s cultivated. Happiness spreads. :red_flag:
      - Your happiness isn’t defined by others, it is defined by you and the daily choices you make. Living a life centered on your priorities is making a choice to be happy, and it’s okay to choose happy. :red_flag:
  - - - Our North Star determines how we want to spend our time and, most importantly, guides our decisions.
    - - I didn’t really know what my North Star was—I had to discover it for myself. And I think that’s one of the most important parts of the process: ownership. You have to take this journey; you have to do the work because this is your path. The good, the bad, and the ugly: It belongs to you. So own it.
    - - DOING: YOUR MISSION STATEMENT
        
        Your mission statement answers the question: “What do I do?” It should be true to you and should be specific enough for people to understand what you do and why you do it. A lot of people and companies get this wrong by using big fancy words that don’t tell us anything. Clear and concise is the name of the game. We want our mission statement to be easy to memorize and repeat because we will be referencing it often.
        
        Here are some examples of mission statements: :red_flag:
        
        AMAZON:3 To offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience.
        
        NIKE:4 To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.
        
        INKWELL PRESS: To provide productivity tools and trainings that empower you to achieve your goals and dreams.
        
        When you think about these companies, do you see how their mission statements allow them to make decisions about their movements and their choices? You’ll notice that their statements are not about the things they do—Nike doesn’t tell you they make athletic gear, and PBS doesn’t talk about producing great children’s programs. Instead, a mission statement gets to the heart of why they do these things: “to bring inspiration and innovation” or “to create content that educates.”
        
        When it comes to your mission statement, maybe the question you should be asking isn’t “What do I do?” but it should dig deeper and ask, “Why do I do what I do?” :red_flag:
        
        You can see how a mission statement helps these companies determine what they spend their resources on—and what they don’t. It allows a large group of people, like the employees of the company, to be empowered to make choices and decisions because they all have a common purpose.
        
        If you’re having trouble getting started, here are a couple of questions you can ask yourself: What am I passionate about? What makes me great? Why do I enjoy what I do? :red_flag:
      - DREAMING: YOUR VISION STATEMENT
        
        A vision statement answers the question: “Where am I going?” It’s where we dream we will be. This may be very different from where we are right now. It helps set our trajectory and define where the destination lies. While the mission statement tells us where we are today, the vision statement clarifies where we want to be in the future. :red_flag:
        
        A vision statement is not your goals—it’s a description of your future that instills hope. It’s not the nitty-gritty details of each step required to get there; it’s a guideline to help you understand the goals you may need to set. It’s not necessarily tied to your current reality—that’s one of the best parts of a vision statement. A vision statement is an opportunity to dream and imagine the best possible future. :red_flag:
        
        Some examples of focused vision statements:
        
        MAKE-A-WISH:9 That people everywhere will share the power of a wish.
        
        AVON:10 To be the company that best understands and satisfies the product, service and self-fulfillment needs of women—globally.
        
        ASPCA:11 That the United States is a humane community in which all animals are treated with respect and kindness.
        
        Did you also notice that all of these are written in absolute terms? You don’t see phrases like “hope to be” or “would like to have” included. They are written as if these statements are inevitable; these visions will absolutely come true.
        
        Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to help you get started: How do I want to evolve and grow? How can I make what I’m doing now even better?
      - DEFINING: YOUR CORE VALUES
        
        Core values answer the question: “How will I support the mission and vision statements?” Your core values are a group of words that work in concert to create the essential standards that guide your behavior and shape your decisions.
        
        You want to create a set of core values that are inspirational and concrete so they have both meaning and action. They should speak to your passions and help drive the decisions you make. When you follow your personal core values, they will fulfill you and help you focus on the person you want to be. Definitively stating your core values doesn’t just help with large decisions; it helps with the seemingly small ones as well.
        
        Here are some examples of core values:
        
        SMITHSONIAN:12 Excellence, Integrity, Respect, Diversity, Intellectual Freedom, Collaboration
        
        ADIDAS:13 Performance, Passion, Integrity, Diversity
        
        ADOBE:14 Genuine, Exceptional, Innovative, Involved
        
        INKWELL PRESS: Harmony, Intention, Family, Love, Generosity, Excellence
        
        I’ve developed an easy three-step process to make it easier to discover your core values.
        
        Reflect + Collect
        
        I often say you need to look backward to keep moving forward. I believe this is true because the bread crumbs of our lives have led us to where we are at this very moment. Begin thinking about the mission and vision statements you hold true, and then take the time to think back to why these statements embody you.
        
        ASK YOURSELF: What words do I want others to use to describe me when I’m not around? What do I do to impact others in a positive way? Is there a gap between what I’m currently doing and what I’m dreaming of doing?
        
        Refine + Define
        
        You will at this point have a good-size list of values, but you don’t want too many because when we are so busy trying to do everything, we end up standing for nothing. I believe six or fewer is a good rule of thumb here: enough to stand for something, but not so many you feel like you’re juggling chain saws.
        
        Now you’ll want to refine your list, so start looking for ways you can group the words together into categories or themes. For example, when I was doing this exercise for myself, I grouped together words like authentic, generosity, kindness, thoughtfulness, and charity because they all embodied a similar idea. Once you group your words into categories, choose a name that embodies the full idea. For my group of words, I ended up naming that value “Grace.” Once you have refined your words into these categories, you need to define what these values mean to you. For me, the value of Grace means I believe the single act of a kind gesture can make a stranger’s day; a nice comment or compliment has the power to transform. Words are different to each of us, with their own meanings and connotations, so taking the time to spell out exactly what each value means helps clarify it even further.
        
        Believe + Achieve
        
        The last step is to begin embodying these values in your daily life. Test the values and make sure they resonate with the mission and vision statements you’ve created for yourself. Ask yourself, Would I stick to this core value even if it created a disadvantage? Does this fit into my personality?
  - - - To be genuinely productive, we must master our focus. That can feel difficult, though, I know. We are pulled in a thousand different directions through the pings on our phones, the blips of our inbox, and the endless opportunities we have before us. In our digital age, we have more information at our fingertips than ever before in history. We have watches that tell us our heart rate and apps that tell us precisely what time we should expect rain this evening. We have alerts on our phones to tell us about traffic and more access to news than we ever even thought we wanted.
    - - The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” It’s not about creating a huge effort; it’s about focusing like a magnifying glass in order to burn the boats. :red_flag:
      - Similar to Archimedes’s mirror, goals focus our energy into a powerful motivator. Goals, when done correctly, are the magnifying glass we need to concentrate our energy and sharpen our focus. They help us weed through all the information and center in on the steps we want to take to move ourselves forward.
      - This is key in moving us along the path our North Star is guiding us toward. Goals are an extension of the foundation we have created, and they help shape our choices to get us to the end result we want.
      - Why does setting goals help? Because it helps us clarify what we want to accomplish. In other words, it tells us where to focus. It enables us to clearly see the path we want to take and triggers our behavior. When we set a goal, it naturally directs our focus to where we want to expend our energy and our time.
      - Without goals, how do you know the trajectory of your path? Goals tell us exactly where to aim.
      - When we lose focus on our priorities, we are simply along for the ride, going wherever the day takes us. The act of focusing is that—an act. It’s a verb rather than a noun. And this focus requires making choices. Choices may feel difficult, because when we eliminate options and “miss out” on purpose, we feel that we are limiting ourselves, but in reality, that’s what allows us the freedom to live the life we really want.
    - - We have to cut in order to really grow and flourish. I know this seems counterintuitive, but think of a garden: Do you plant the flowers one on top of another? Do you squeeze so many in that there is no room? Or do you allow each plant to have space—space to receive the rain and the sun, space to spread their leaves and grow? That’s what we need: space to allow ourselves to focus. The only way to have that space is to actively create it for ourselves. We need boundaries.
      - When we compartmentalize, we give ourselves that space and freedom. In the first section of the book, I talked about the three buckets in our lives: work, home, and personal. Creating boundaries allows you to focus on each area within its own time so that each is treated as a priority in its dedicated space.
      - The time we spend doesn’t need to be perfectly equal for each. Sometimes we want to spend more time in one compartment than another. Remember, it’s not about balance—balance doesn’t exist—it’s all about creating harmony.
      - Sometimes we are our own worst distraction.
      - You know what I’m talking about—we’ve all done it. We check our email on our phone, see nothing there, and then inexplicably check it again two minutes later. Did we expect something to change in there? Or the bigger question is, what do we expect to see in there? One study found that one in three people claimed8 to check their email every fifteen minutes, but in reality they were checking every five minutes! This means we are constantly interrupting ourselves and we’re not even aware of it. :red_flag:
    - - Let your work team know that you won’t be responding to email immediately when it’s outside of work hours. Many of us do feel the need to check in after hours, and that’s okay. We just don’t need to be at the beck and call of our business at every hour of the day. We can set aside a block of time to intentionally check in with work after hours; just make sure you don’t leave that block open-ended. Set a start time and an end time for you to jump back into that work compartment.
    - - She opted to block off the first two hours of her day on her shared calendar to focus on deeper work. She also decided that she would not check email until after her block was finished, because she felt that her inbox had the power to lead her astray, affecting the flow of her day and her mood. She liked the idea of a series of small wins first thing in her day—but didn’t think the strategy would really work. It’s a pipe dream, she thought.
  - - - We need to change the way we think about being productive. We believe that we need to be efficient, to try to get as many tasks done in as little time as possible. We cram our day full with one task after the other in a mad dash to win the day. You know what I’m talking about. We’ve all seen the clickbait articles promising you can write a year’s worth of blog content in three days or fooling you into believing you can write a book in a week.
      - Hurry, hurry, rush, rush. No time for lunch. No time to stop. Quickly moving from one task to the next with the goal of checking off as many tasks from our list as we can in as little time as possible. Being efficient.
      - Are we stopping to ask ourselves, though, if those tasks need to be done at all? Are those things we are hurrying to do really important? Or are we just mindlessly rushing through our to-do list, pinballing from one item to the next, exhausting ourselves? This is why we slip into bed and feel as though we didn’t do enough or get enough done, that we weren’t good enough even when we skipped lunch and did five tasks at the same time. Enough.
      - We are so busy working to be efficient that we don’t have the time to catch our breath and ask ourselves the most important question of all: Why? Why are these tasks on our list? Why do they need to be done? Why are we killing ourselves to do it all?
      - Unfortunately, when people focus on being efficient, the resource we target is time. We fail to realize that being efficient is about getting things done; being effective is getting what’s important done. There’s a big difference. :red_flag:
      - Remember, efficiency is doing a lot of work; effectiveness is doing the important work. Quality wins every time. And yes, we want to use less energy and time, but not at the expense of quality. Sometimes we are so caught up in deadlines, we don’t realize that the processes we believe make us faster are working against us. I call these the three myths of productivity. :red_flag:
        
        MYTH 1: I’M AN EXCELLENT MULTITASKER
        
        A lot of what we call multitasking is really switch-tasking: simultaneously performing two tasks at the same time, switching from one task to another and performing two or more tasks in rapid succession. The problem is, our brains are not designed to work that way; each section is designed to do one task at a time—like a lightbulb turning on and off.
        
        If I am being honest, I think I multitask and get things done for a few reasons. I am very committed to seeing things through. . . . I don’t want people to question my work, so maybe part of it is a need to prove I can do it all (and well) . . . proving my worth. Also, if I am focusing on “all the things,” I don’t have to dig deeper and get to the messy, vulnerable stuff. :red_flag:
        
        We want people to think we are good enough—that we deserve the praise, the job, all the good. Why do we feel the need to prove it? :red_flag:
        
        MYTH 2: I DON’T HAVE TIME TO TAKE A BREAK
        
        One common technique we use is to muscle through projects even when we feel tired or sluggish. We are so busy racing the clock that we don’t realize our brains need time to rest.
        
        PERIODS OF REST ARE NOT A reward FOR GREAT WORK BUT ARE A REQUIREMENT FOR GREAT WORK to happen
        
        MYTH 3: TECHNOLOGY IS ALWAYS BETTER
        
        One common misconception is the belief that technology is necessary to do everything better, but it’s simply not true. Technology is faster and sleeker, but it may surprise you to learn that writing down your ideas and plans on paper is more effective.
        
        Taking notes on a computer is much more efficient, but it’s not as effective. And that’s the difference.
        
        Not only does paper engage your brain differently, but because it is more open-ended and flexible, it allows you to reframe thoughts and mold ideas in a way that ingrains the information. This flexibility pushes your brain to actually process and reframe data, deepening the brain’s understanding.
    - - You’ve probably heard it called the 80/20 rule:
        
        20 percent of a meeting gives you 80 percent of the information
        
        20 percent of your wardrobe is what you wear 80 percent of the time
        
        20 percent of the people on your team do 80 percent of the work
      - The ratio isn’t perfect—it’s not always right on the money at a perfect 80/20 split. Warren Buffett attributes 90 percent11 of his wealth to ten of the companies he invested in. Again and again it’s been proven that when you focus on less, you actually achieve more. It’s focused time that creates the greatest impact. It’s not doing more—it’s doing what’s most important. (Sound familiar?)
    - - No matter which bowl I choose, I will end up eating the amount of ice cream that fills it. My idea of how much ice cream I need expands to the size of the bowl I have. Time works in exactly the same way.
      - It’s called Parkinson’s Law, and it’s the concept that “work expands so as to fill12 the time available for its completion.” Let me translate this into regular English. This law states that if we give ourselves a week to complete a two-hour task, that task will increase in complexity and fill that week. While the two-hour task itself doesn’t need the extra time, it’s actually the stress and tension of having to get it done that fills the space.
      - Since the majority of that time is not necessary for the project itself, we can flip it on its head. If we do the opposite—if we shorten the time allowed for a task—we can use this law to our advantage to intensify our focus and make life easier . . . almost as easy as eating a bowl of ice cream. (Almost.)
      - Now we’re not talking about magic here—if you give yourself a minute to complete a four-hour task, the task does not become so simple you can actually complete it in a minute. But you can try giving yourself half the time you think it would take to complete a task and see if you can actually complete it in that time.
      - The key to this mental trick is to treat this half-time deadline as a real and crucial deadline. Here’s what life coach and author Marie Forleo had to say about this trick: “When you’re up against a wall13 to complete a task, your genius gets focused like a laser beam.”
    - - We get caught up in trying to do it all because we are trying to be perfect—to live the perfect life—to avoid the judgment of others. I think the hardest part about perfectionism is often the external pressure; there’s so much perceived pressure from others to do things exactly right. We push ourselves to not make any mistakes because perfectionism is rooted in the fear of failure. :red_flag:
  - - - Our worth is not tied to the length of our to-do list. We allow this constrictive notion of merit to define us, but we are simply overwhelming ourselves. Remember our definition of what it means to be overwhelmed? Overwhelm isn’t having too much to do; it’s not knowing where to start. Our long checklist doesn’t show us where to start. Instead, it confuses us more, spinning us in circles as we feverishly scan our tasks, wondering how we will possibly get it all done.
      - People love checking items off their to-do lists. Have you ever written down something on your list that you’ve already completed, just so you could check it off? I used to do that too. The problem is, if we are putting items on our lists just to check them off, then our lists aren’t helping us be more effective—they are turning us into dopamine junkies.
      - We are using our lists3 as mood enhancers, not as productivity tools.
      - To-do lists tend to be unorganized and long because there’s no filtering system. We simply add items as we think of them. When we scan our jumbled lists looking for our next task, our brains push us to choose the easiest wins—searching for a faster dopamine payoff. You see, dopamine doesn’t distinguish between important and unimportant; it just knows that crossing items off our lists feels good. And that means that the important tasks on our lists end up waiting to get crossed off. Let’s be honest, it’s usually those longer tasks that will move us toward the life we want. Our true priorities continue to get pushed farther and farther down on our lists, forgotten and undone.
    - - Our priority list is made of three levels: Escalate, Cultivate, and Accommodate. Let’s look at each one, starting with the top.
        
        ESCALATE: IMPORTANT AND URGENT
        
        We want to avoid Escalated situations whenever possible, but we’ll never be able to eliminate them. Fires will always crop up—the boss assigns a last-minute presentation, the internet goes down, your kid gets sick at school—but for things that are in our control, we want to stay out of urgency mode.
        
        CULTIVATE: IMPORTANT BUT NOT URGENT
        
        These are activities that move us closer to our end goals because they are focused around future planning and self-improvement but have no looming deadline.
        
        EXAMPLES: creating a budget plan, long-term projects, or developing processes and workflows.
        
        Being in a situation without an urgent deadline allows us to do our best work because we have the time to really push ourselves and innovate. We can dive deeper into thinking of creative solutions; we are not in panic mode where we cannot think clearly. Because there’s no urgency, though, we tend to push these items to the back burner until they finally do ignite, and then we end up feeling like we are fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.
        
        ACCOMMODATE: UNIMPORTANT BUT URGENT
        
        These are tasks with a pressing deadline, but they don’t really help us focus on our North Star or our long-term goals.
        
        EXAMPLES: the majority of the phone calls and emails we receive or volunteering for (or being pressured to accept) a project that does not align with our priorities. (This is the “good girl syndrome,” when we just can’t say no when someone asks us to do something.)
        
        We want to spend as little time in this section as possible, but because of the urgency, these tasks tend to scream out louder than the rest.
        
        Looking at our tasks by priority helps us see what needs to be done now (Escalate), what should be worked on for long-term wins (Cultivate), and what should be reevaluated (Accommodate). I know we keep going back to our definition of overwhelm, but it’s true—when we know where to start, it empowers us to feel more in charge of ourselves and motivates us to work on the important areas of our life. A good priority list tells us exactly where to start.
        
        GETTING CLEAR ON WHAT’S IMPORTANT
  - - - This concept of taking a big item and breaking it down into pieces applies to our tasks, projects, goals—basically anything we want to tackle. Bite-size wins build momentum and bring us a little satisfaction bit by bit. Happiness increases if we view our tasks1 as a series of many small milestones instead of one huge, looming chore. While laundry isn’t scary, it is overwhelming to think we will never get it accomplished, which is why we put it off or why we feel so irritated by it. Small bites, though, give us something achievable to focus on.
    - - Habit can feel like a bad word. We hear about habits and we think about biting our nails or snacking too much or smoking. We think all habits are bad6, but researchers at Duke University actually found that about 40 to 45 percent of the actions we make each day are actually habits, not really decisions.
      - We need to leverage our habits to free up our brain space, to take the thinking out of it and allow ourselves the ability to make the choices that really matter. Building strong habits isn’t hard; it just takes some extra energy at the beginning. Once they are established, habits require less effort, less energy, and less thinking to maintain. They take the thinking out of tasks. Your brain stops wasting calories and channels all its energy to move you forward.
    - - ARTICULATE THE HABIT
      - IDENTIFY THE CUES
      - DEFINE THE BEHAVIOR
      - MAKE A PLAN
        
        A good plan includes the three Rs—record, reward, and redirect.