Effortless (book)
✒️ Note-Making
🔗Connect
🔼Topic:: Mindset (MOC) 🔼Topic:: workflows (MOC)
💡Clarify
🔈 Summary of main ideas
- Life is a marathon, not a sprint - Productivity was never about pushing yourself to the limit of exhaustion and burnout. It is about finding a way to do things effortlessly, thinking about our life as a marathon, not a sprint.
- Effortless is mindset, action and results - We got used to thinking that success is directly linked to effort, such that the more effort you give, the more success you will have, and that effort has become a badge of honor. The effortless method challenges that and sets a better path for more satisficing life. Find ways to make the tasks easy, fun, automated, leverage others abilities and knowledge, take care of your body, and remember that baby steps are better than burnout.
🗒️Relate
⛓ Life lessons, action items
🔍Critique
✅ by following this method, what will happen?
❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...
🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... most of the tips are trivial, impossible to implement, or vague.
🗨️Review
💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... The book is nice but too superficial and simple. its a collection of ideas, briefly described, and most of the book is a series of cherry picked examples. However, I did like the summaries at the end of each chapter, and in some cases there are recommendations for implementation. In the end it was a series of short essays, didn't add much to what I already know.
I finished the book without any take-aways, this is unfortunate, this is why I give this book only 3 stars, because it is in the right direction, but not as thorough or informative that I would like.
🖼️Outline
📒 Notes
Part 1: Effortless State
First we need a new mindset, one that doesn't connect between Struggle and success. Its okay to be lazy and get good results, and its even the smarter one instead of "pushing through" or banging your head through the wall.
- When you simply can’t try any harder, it’s time to find a different path.
- Burnout is not a badge of honor.
- if you prioritize the most important things first, then there will be room in your life not only for what matters most but also for other things too. But do the reverse, and you’ll get the trivial things done but run out of space for the things that really matter.
- For you who gives so much, I say this: there is another way. Not everything has to be so hard. Getting to the next level doesn’t have to mean chronic exhaustion. Making a contribution doesn’t have to come at the expense of your mental and physical health.
- Motivation is not enough because it is a limited resource. To truly make progress on the things that matter, we need a whole new way to work and live. Instead of trying to get better results by pushing ever harder, we can make the most essential activities the easiest ones.
- the first step toward making things more effortless is to clear the clutter in our heads and our hearts.
- Perfectionism makes essential projects hard to start, self-doubt makes them hard to finish, and trying to do too much, too fast, makes it hard to sustain momentum.
- Effortless Action alone produces linear results. But when we apply Effortless Action to high-leverage activities, the return on our effort compounds,
- The Effortless State is one in which you are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energized. You are completely present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in that moment. You are able to do what matters most with ease.
Invert - what if This Could Be Easy?
Do it smart: So ask yourself "what if it was easy", and look for a creative solution . Solve the easier problem
- We are conditioned over the course of our lifetimes to believe that in order to overachieve we must also overdo. As a result, we make things harder for ourselves than they need to be.
- Effortless Inversion means looking at problems from the opposite perspective. It means asking, “What if this could be easy?” It means learning to solve problems from a state of focus, clarity, and calm. It means getting good at getting things done by putting in less effort.
- Free of the assumptions that make your problem look hard, you would be surprised how often an easier solution appears.
Enjoy - what if This Could Be Fun?
Make it fun: You'll experience less Burnout and more happiness when the things have to do are also fun Temptation Bundling. Why not listen to music while washing the dishes?
- essential work can be enjoyable once we put aside the Puritan notion that anything worth doing must entail backbreaking effort.
- There is power in pairing our most enjoyable activities with our most essential ones.
- It’s not just that work and play can co-exist, it’s that they can complement each other. Together they make it easier to tap into our creativity and come up with novel ideas and solutions.
- When we attach small fragments of wonder to mundane tasks, we are no longer waiting for the time when we can finally allow ourselves to relax. That time is always now. As fun and laughs lighten more of our moments, we are drawn back further toward our natural, playful Effortless State.
Release - the Power of Letting Go
keep the essentials - discard old goals that are no longer relevant Addition by subtraction, thoughts that take up mental space in your head, and feelings of resentment or hatred. Acceptance
- When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack.
- When we let go of our need to punish those who’ve hurt us, it’s not the culprit who is freed. We are freed. When we surrender grudges and complaints in favor of grace and compassion, it’s not an equal exchange. It’s a coup. And with every trade, we return closer to the calm of our Effortless State.
Rest - the Art of Doing Nothing
Rest - Sleep is essential to the human body. make sure you have at least 7-8 hours of sleep. take naps. have a nice shower an hour and a half before bedtime.
- Do not do more today than you can completely recover from today.
- Dedicate mornings to essential work. Break down that work into three sessions of no more than ninety minutes each. Take a short break (ten to fifteen minutes) in between sessions to rest and recover.
Notice - how to See Clearly
be aware - Really be observant. Put aside thoughts and prejudice and just be there with the people around you mindfulness. This will produce a feeling of Flow
- It’s not the noticing itself that’s hard. It’s ignoring all the noise in our environment that is hard.
- To be in the Effortless State is to be aware, alert, and present, even in the face of fast-moving information and the endless onslaught of distractions.
- When we’re fully present with people, it has an impact. Not just in that moment either. The experience of feeling like the most important person in the world even for the briefest of moments can stay with us for a disproportionate time after the moment has passed.
- The greatest gift we can offer to others is not our skill or our money or our effort. It is simply us. None of us have infinite reserves of focus and attention to give away. But in the Effortless State, it becomes far easier to give the gift of our intentional focus to the people and things we really care about.
- The goal is to accomplish what matters by trying less, not more: to achieve our purpose with bridled intention, not overexertion. This is what is meant by Effortless Action.
Part 2 - Effortless Action
Define - What "done" Looks like
define a goal - the more you define a clear, simple, measurable goal, the easier it will be to start and finish it. Don't overdue tasks, it not only requires more effort but also will damage the final result. Life's Mission
- If you want to make something hard, indeed truly impossible, to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible.
- To avoid diminishing returns on your time and effort, establish clear conditions for what “done” looks like, get there, then stop.
Start - The First Obvious Action
the first action - similar to the next action from Getting Things Done (book), it requires to understand what is the smallest step needed to start your project.
- We often get overwhelmed because we misjudge what the first step is: what we think is the first step is actually several steps. But once we break that step down into concrete, physical actions, that first obvious action begins to feel effortless.
- The first action may be the tiniest, easiest-to-overlook thing. But it is surprisingly fierce.
Simplify - Start with Zero
start simple - if the process requires a lot of complex steps, stop and start from scratch. Think of a new process, as simple as possible, and try to implement it. Avoid being drawn by Sunk Cost. Simplicity
- If there are processes in your life that seem to involve an inordinate number of steps, try starting from zero. Then see if you can find your way back to those same results, only take fewer steps.
- You might be surprised at how many seemingly complex goals can be obtained, and how many seemingly complex tasks can be completed, in just a few steps.
Progress - The Courage to Be Rubbish
Make it okay to fail - mistakes are a great way to learn and improve. If you can create an environment where mistakes are "cheap" and frequent, the faster you'll learn. Failure Simulations
- don’t try to get everything exactly right the first time. Instead, embrace the rubbish
- Overachievers tend to struggle with the notion of starting with rubbish; they hold themselves to a high standard of perfection at every stage in the process. But the standard to which they hold themselves is neither realistic nor productive.
- There is no mastery without mistakes. And there is no learning later without the courage to be rubbish.
- To make effortless progress on what matters, learning-sized mistakes must be encouraged.
- if you are feeling overwhelmed by an essential project because you think you have to produce something flawless from the outset, simply lower the bar to start.
Pace - Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast
Find your Rhythm - Every action has to have a low threshold, so you could easily start working on it and gain Momentum, but also you need a top threshold, so that you wont cause you Burnout. For example, set for yourself that you will learn 15 minutes each day, but even if you can study more, don't do it. Don't do too much today that you wont be able to recover from tomorrow.
- When we’re trying to achieve something that matters to us, it’s tempting to want to sprint out of the gate. The problem is that going too fast at the beginning will almost always slow us down the rest of the way.
- there are few better ways to achieve effortless pace than to set an upper bound.
- Finding the right range keeps us moving at a steady pace so we can make consistent progress. The lower bound should be high enough to keep us feeling motivated, and low enough that we can still achieve it even on days when we’re dealing with unexpected chaos. The upper bound should be high enough to constitute good progress, but not so high as to leave us feeling exhausted.
- Linear results are limited: they can never exceed the amount of effort exerted. What many people don’t realize, however, is that there exists a far better alternative. Residual results are completely different. With residual results you exert effort once and reap the benefits again and again. Results continue to flow to you, whether you put in additional effort or not.
Part 3 - Effortless Results
Effortless results come from cumulative processes Compounding.
Learn - Leverage the Best of what Others Know
knowledge - knowledge is the "gift that keeps on giving". First gather knowledge from others, than find your area and dive into it. Lifelong Learning
- Being good at what nobody is doing is better than being great at what everyone is doing.
- To reap the residual results of knowledge, the first step is to leverage what others know. But the ultimate goal is to identify knowledge that is unique to you, and build on it.
- Gaining unique knowledge takes time, dedication, and effort. But invest in it once, and you’ll attract opportunities for the rest of your life.
Lift - Harness the Strength of Ten
- If you try to teach people everything about everything, you run the risk of teaching them nothing. You will achieve residual results faster if you clearly identify—then simplify—the most important messages you want to teach others to teach.
- Make the most essential things the easiest ones to teach and the easiest ones to learn.
Automate - Do it once and Never Again
Automation - designed to reduce time and/or effort Friction. It can be like scheduling recurring events in your calendar, templates for various lists so you wont need to write everything from scratch each time, and also to reduce that chance of error.
- we all need tools to help us remember what’s important. The beauty of the checklist is that the thinking has been done ahead of time.
- Blocking off time for the things that matter may sound simple in theory. But in practice it can be difficult to do consistently, because reality gets in the way. Yet the effort we invest in automating our most mundane but essential tasks yields significant and repeated benefits later on.
Trust - the Engine of High-leverage Team
Trust people - the best way to create new connections that are easy to manage and develop is through Trust.
- When you have trust in your relationships, they take less effort to maintain and manage.
- When you can say these four little words, “I trust your judgment”—and mean them—it’s like magic. Team members feel empowered. They take a risk. They grow. Trust is strengthened. And then it tends to spread.
Prevent - Solve the Problem before it Happens
- we often fail to recognize is that some tasks that seem “not worth it” in the moment may save us one hundred times the time and aggravation over the long run.
- Mistakes are dominoes: they have a cascading effect. When we strike at the root by catching our mistakes before they can do any damage, we don’t just prevent that first domino from toppling, we prevent the entire chain reaction.