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Less Doing, More Living
Make Everything in Life Easier
Less Doing, More Living (2014) guides you through nine fundamental steps on your journey toward becoming more effective. In these blinks, the author shares his favorite tools and techniques for optimizing, automating and outsourcing everything on that pesky to-do list, thus giving you time for the things that are most important in your life.
- Anyone who feels like they’re losing time
- Personal trainers
- People who want to lead a happier lifestyle
Ari Meisel is an author and entrepreneur. He advises businesses, leaders and others on how to add value to their endeavors and lives by employing effective time-management strategies.
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Less Doing, More Living
Make Everything in Life Easier
- Read in 16 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 10 key ideas
Synopsis
Less Doing, More Living (2014) guides you through nine fundamental steps on your journey toward becoming more effective. In these blinks, the author shares his favorite tools and techniques for optimizing, automating and outsourcing everything on that pesky to-do list, thus giving you time for the things that are most important in your life.
Key idea 1 of 10
Track your life to learn where you can start saving time.
Maybe you’ve heard of the 80-20 rule? It states that 80 percent of what you accomplish is the result of a mere 20 percent of all the time and energy you invest. And this isn’t only applicable to work or study. It’s the case for everything you do. So how can we figure out what time isn’t worth spending?
One way is to start tracking.
But who’s got time to live their busy schedule and observe it? Luckily, there are resources out there to make tracking your time much easier.
Enter RescueTime, a program that monitors what you’re actually doing on your computer all day. If you find that a particular website or application is stealing your day away, RescueTime will help you block access to it. Problem solved!
But what if it’s not just your productivity you want to track, but your health?
Take it back to basics with an old-school paper journal to record everything you eat during the day. You could also get your hands on a pedometer to count all the steps you take, or simply make an effort to weigh yourself each day. Because the more you know about your day, the sooner you’ll be able to improve it.
But what does it mean to improve something as broad as our daily routine? Think of it as optimizing your processes. For a role model, look to IKEA. Each IKEA product comes with highly optimized instruction manuals for assembling each product, whether it’s a coffee table or geometric lamp.
These instructions have been boiled down to their very essence – a few language-independent, easy-to-follow steps. It’s time to approach your life like IKEA approaches their manuals. Whatever the task, whether it’s writing emails or organizing meetings, you should minimize fuss and get it done in as few steps as possible.
Key ideas in this title
- Track your life to learn where you can start saving time.
- Create an external brain to save valuable space in your own.
- Customize to save time – and money!
- Take control of your workweek.
- Errands add up, so eliminate them!
- Stay on top of your finances with the latest tools.
- Give yourself limits and boost your quality of life.
- Batch your tasks to stay focused.
- Health is the ultimate productivity secret.
- Final summary
