Less Doing, More Living summary

We all like to think of ourselves as great multi-taskers with brilliant memories. But we’re not. Most of us don’t actually have enough room in our minds to juggle all the information we need to keep track of. What we all need is an extra brain. But this is impossible, right?

No! It’s not impossible at all. An extra brain is available to everyone.

Let’s imagine you’ve got a great idea for the perfect bedroom shelving unit to suit your needs. You know you’ll have to build it yourself, which means buying the materials, borrowing tools, and spending hours preparing and cleaning up. It sounds like quite the project. If only there was an easier and less expensive way!

Well, there is: 3D printing. 

When Tim Ferriss published his bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, everyone knew there was some exaggeration involved – you obviously can’t get a book written if you only work four hours each week! Nevertheless, The 4-Hour Workweek makes an important point: you need to make your workweek yours, and decide what to do, and when. 

The first step in owning your work-week is to determine which hours of the day are your best working hours. Knowing this will automatically make you more effective. Some people prefer working at night; others, in the morning. Some like working a bit every day, while others like to squeeze a lot into shorter periods of time.

If you had a clear conception of how much time you spend running errands each month, you’d be shocked. But we rarely think of errands like this. A dash to the corner store for toilet paper or dish soap, that’s no big deal, right? 

But errands like these add up; they can take a massive dent in your day. So, if you want more productivity, you’ve got to kill those errands!

In the first blink, we learned about the value of tracking things like your time and dietary habits. However, it’s not always beneficial to spend loads of time tracking everything. Trying to track your finances, for example, can often result in strain and stress.

Keeping tabs on what and where you spend is a challenge, especially when you have several bank accounts and credit cards, not to mention things like loans, mortgages, and stocks and bonds. 

We’ve all been there: a desk seething with piles of paper; a floor only traversable via a narrow path through a chaos of stuff. And surrounded by all that stuff, you can never find exactly what you need when you need it.

But there’s no need for this headache! You can overcome it by setting limits for yourself. 

Have you ever had the frustrating experience of just getting into something – and then being interrupted by a distracting text or email? It ruins your focus and now you’re irritated to boot.

Well, there’s a way to keep your focus from being destroyed like this. It’s called batching. 

It’s as simple as this: getting enough shut-eye and eating healthy determines how much energy you will have to do the things you want to do. No amount of productivity apps in the world can change this!

When you deprive yourself of sleep, your body starts producing a rather unpleasantly named hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin increases hunger and lowers levels of another hormone, leptin, which regulates metabolism. When our metabolism doesn’t function properly, we will inevitably get tired.