We’re edging ever nearer to launching our new site and Inside Minimalism series, and as part of this, we’ll be working alongside a couple of wonderful writers. We’ll be launching this in March, but you can already subscribe to it today if you want to support us, as this will be 100% advertisement-free.
Time Taken: When to Say No
By George Maguire
As somebody who has spent the early stage of his career in small scale businesses, I have often found myself with a lot on my plate. I was working in various food businesses, marketing, writing, researching, and designing—all complex skills in their own right. With endless to-do lists, expansive projects, and under resourced deadlines, it can become a slippery slope to ‘good enough’. Somewhere in-between the chopping block, the article, the subscriber database, and the post office, it dawned on me that I was spreading myself too thin and overcommitting.
I was doing something of everything, chipping away at more things than I could ever complete to the standards I had set in stone a week before. At best, I was unproductive and distracted. At worst, highly stressed. I began to see that shifting from creative work to logical, analytical work was frying my brain, leaving precious attention and good work on the table. These weren’t just different outputs; the states of mind just weren’t compatible.
Of course, my situation was to be expected. Anything organised around an exciting idea and common motive begins its life messy—it must be. Youth is by nature immature and early progress has a way of thriving and thrashing forward in ebbs and flows. I could only imagine that larger, more concrete workplaces would be more subdued and civilised in their old age.
At the same time as all this chaos, I was clarifying my viewpoint on what I found to be important in life. I began to realise and understand what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be. I began to get a sense of where my value was and how I could best position myself at work and by extension, the world.
“The real power of minimalism lies in what you’re prepared to say no to.”
I realised that saying ‘no’ allowed me to say ‘yes’ to projects that I could fully and significantly contribute to. I could leverage my skills and make the best work possible. Doubling down on what I was good at had practical benefits, for me, and for my employers; as stressed and durable as they were.
Outside of work, a few things have revealed themselves to me as most highly important:
Spending time with my girlfriend, friends and family, moving my body, engaging in creative idea-fluid work, time in nature and in foreign cities. A life filled with these things is what I would consider successful living.
Don’t be like a porous rock—letting everything in and becoming soggy and saturated. Be like granite—hold your walls, know your weight in the world, and hold off the ever-tempting embrace of compromise. Value yourself and say no.
Focus Is About Saying No
By Carl MH Barenbrug
Focusing our minds is essential to productivity, high performance, and awareness, but our focus is constantly under siege by things grasping for our attention. Some of us may excel in multitasking, but you will undoubtedly perform better with full, selective attention. It’s not exactly supernatural. Our attention is a precious commodity, and it requires protection. Not just by avoiding things that distract us, but also through exercising our attention through techniques like meditation. You might call that mindfulness or cognitive control.
Generally speaking, us humans are keen to please. We say yes to a lot of things because we feel we can fit it all in. It also means we avoid making tough decisions that may disappoint or offend others. But where does that ultimately lead? Well, it leads to several places—one of those being stress, and another being mediocracy.
“You’d think focus means saying yes, but it actually means to say no.” —Steve Jobs
I think the key to being focused is through living by design, and not by default. Meaning that we deliberately make a distinction between the vital few from the trivial many—eliminating everything that is non-essential to us. And it’s this elimination that will drive us to say no to distractions—to the noise.
We can even look at this from a wider standpoint, and analyse what we’re actually saying yes to, and how this not only affects the tasks we perform, but also the lives we lead. Sometimes we will say ‘yes’ to something that is seemingly important, but by doing so, we are inadvertently saying ‘no’ to things that are even more important—our physical and mental health, our relationships, and even our creativity. Scale it back, be more intentional, and don’t be afraid of saying no—even to the good things.
Recommended Reading: Focus by Daniel Goleman and Essentialism by Greg McKeown
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