Review: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

This is a business / productivity book which tries to teach you not how to get more done, but how to get the right things done—the ones where you can make your biggest contribution and the ones which will move the needle the most.

Here are my notes with some of the core ideas:

• The only way to be able to do the right things—the really important or “essential” ones—is to remove all the other things. Those other things may have value too, but if you say yes to these less important things, you’re implicitly saying no to the more important things. The goal is to do less, but better. “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” (Stephen R. Covey)

• Most of us are juggling too many things at once. As a result, we’re stuck in a loop where we can only make “a millimeter of progress in a thousand directions.” We would be more effective if we instead focused all our energy on one essential thing and made a ton of progress all in one direction. One priority, not many. In fact, the word priority used to be singular: the idea of having “10 priorities” makes no sense! When everything is a priority, nothing is. “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”

• It’s hard to stop doing things you’re already doing; we place higher value in things that we already own. Here’s one litmus test to help: ask yourself a question along the lines of, “if I didn’t already own this item, how much would I spend to obtain it?” Or similarly, “if I wasn’t already doing this task, would I put in a bunch of work to start doing it now?” And one more flavor, “if I didn’t already have this opportunity, how much effort would I expend to seek it out?”

• You don’t have to say yes to everyone. It’s OK to say no. Saying no may be uncomfortable and awkward at first, but you’ll get better at it. Although the person asking will be disappointed initially, they will usually respect you more for sticking to your principles. “Entrepreneurs succeed when they say ‘yes’ to the right project, at the right time, in the right way. To accomplish this, they have to be good at saying ‘no’ to all their other ideas.” (Reid Hoffman)

• Life is all about trade-offs. These trade-offs are unavoidable: due to resource constraints—with the most scarce and essential resource being time—you just cannot do it all. So your best bet is to deliberately and consciously make these trade-offs to find the most valuable things. If you instead try to do it all, you’ll succeed at some items, fail at others, and it’ll be random which is which. Since there are far more unimportant things than essential ones, if you don’t make trade-offs deliberately, the most likely outcome is that you’ll succeed at the unimportant items at the direct cost of failing at the essential items. “Dieter Rams was the lead designer at Braun for many years. He is driven by the idea that almost everything is noise. He believes very few things are essential. His job is to filter through that noise until he gets to the essence.”

• Essentialism doesn’t mean you obsess solely over work and eschew all time for relaxation and play. In fact, time to stop and think and play is essential. Play allows creativity, plasticity, adaptability. Time away from work is what allows you to explore the solution space enough to find what is truly essential.

• Always leave a buffer. The only predictable thing in life is that the unexpected will happen. So you must have buffers built in to account for that. For example, imagine your goal was to drive 10 miles without ever having to come to a full stop. You can’t predict what other cars will do, or the traffic lights, or anything else along the way, so the only chance you have of making this happen is to maintain a huge buffer of space betwen your car and anyone in front of you. You should factor significant buffers into all planning to account for the unexpected. This even applies to tasks where you think you know what’s expected: e.g., just because you got a task done in 5 minutes once in the past doesn’t mean it’ll always be possible to get it done in 5 minutes in the future. Expect the unexpected.

• From the book The Goal: the only way to make a system more efficient is to repeatedly fix the biggest constraint or bottleneck. For example, imagine a troop of hikers, where your goal is to get everyone to a camp site as quickly as possible. Optimizing the speed of your medium and fast hikers doesn’t improve your efficiency at completing this goal at all. The only thing that will help you acccomplish that goal faster is to identify the slowest hiker in the group and do everything you can to help them move faster (e.g., distribute the items they are carrying amongst the rest of the group). Every improvement you make to the speed of that slowest hiker helps the entire group accomplish the goal faster. So the key question to ask in every business and other activity is: what’s your biggest bottleneck? What’s the biggest constraint on the whole system? Who is the slowest hiker? Fix the biggest bottleneck, find the next biggest one, fix that, and repeat again and again. Focusing on anything but the biggest bottleneck is a waste of time.

• On a related note: if it turns out that your biggest bottleneck is a person, you probably won’t be able to fix that bottleneck by just repeatedly asking them, “when will it be done?” Instead, you’ll need to offer them help. Ask them, “what can we do to help you get this done faster?”

The book is stuffed with a lot of other tips & tricks, mostly borrowed from other books that cover those tips & tricks in far more detail: e.g., incrementalism and MVPs are better discussed in The Lean Startup; the principle of flow is better discussed in the book of the same name by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; the importance of making a little bit of progress every day is better covered in The Progress Principle; the power off habits is better discussed in Atomic Habits; and so on.

One thing notably absent is how to handle complex, messy, multi-faceted real-world problems. For example, getting a new startup off the ground. What, exactly, is essential there, and what’s not? Building the product? Figuring out marketing? Hiring a sales team? Sorting out all the legal & tax details? Security? Team dynamics? It feels a bit like asking which part of an airplane is essential: the wings, the tail, or the engine? It seems like if any of those are missing in an airplane, you’re dead; similarly, with a startup, it seems like if any of those 50 items are missing, you’re also dead. And yet, working on all 50 often feels like making “a millimeter of progress in a thousand directions.” So while at a high level, figuring out one or two things that are truly essential and ignoring the rest seems to make sense, when you get into the details, it’s a lot less clear.

Rating: 4 stars