Zen Habits: Productivity Through Simplicity

Posted July 12, 2010

Sometimes the easiest way to check items off your to-do list is simply to decide those items are not worth doing. While this sounds obvious at best or counter-productive at worst, Leo Babauta at ZenHabits.com shares his Zen / minimalism insights that have helped him accomplish more and enjoy work to the fullest.

Similar in spirit to Tim Ferriss’s productivity tome, The Four Hour Work Week, Leo encourages you to examine your daily work routine with a highly critical eye. There are tasks in every work day that help us to build momentum (the term Leo uses to describe fulfilling work that begets more fulfilling work), and there are tasks that only serve to provide “friction” that works against that momentum.

By determining which facets of your work create the most “friction” rather than momentum, we can begin to streamline our day to eliminate friction tasks and accomplish more, while focusing on the parts of work that give us the most pleasure.

While Leo’s advice is primarily written for the self-employed or work-at-home types, it can (and should) be applied to anyone with any control over their workflow. Some examples:

If you do a lot of paperwork, can you require forms to be filled out digitally, perhaps online? This will eliminate a lot of work, and if the database is set up right, eliminate filing.

Also unsubscribe from newsletters and notifications and so forth, so you don’t have to spend time processing them in your inbox. Consider each email that comes in and ask yourself: “How could this be eliminated?”

Can you eliminate meetings, or at least get out of them? How can you get the info without meetings? How can projects get done without the meetings?

To read more about Leo’s ideas of productivity through simplicity, check out his post Frictionless Work: How to Clear Your Life of Non-Essential Tasks.