After listening to an Art of Manliness podcast interview with Greg McKeown last week I went straight ahead and listened to the audiobook version of his work ‘Essentialism’. The basic idea of Essentialism is that it is a mindset in which you seek extreme clarity on where/how you can make your best contribution in life and then focus ruthlessly on paring back activity that does not align with this goal. The underlying principle is one of ‘less but better’. McKeown argues that there is an increasing tendency for people to adopt a non-essentialist mindset by default and that it is necessary to actively combat this by shifting toward Essentialism as a way of life.
There were two particular elements of Essentialism that struck a chord with me. First, there was the ‘less is better’ principle. I think it is hard to argue against this but very easy to slip into a mode of working which runs counter to it. ‘Less is better’ works for me because it is expressed so simply but captures a lot (so it is, itself, a great example of less is better!). Secondly, I liked the idea that you should look for your ‘essential intention’ and see this as one decision made now that saves you from one thousand future decisions. However, I do struggle to come up with one essential intention that covers every aspect of my work/life and think it would probably work better or be more useful to find several complementary essential intentions for the various roles that I have (bear in mind that my work is very much multi-faceted – a kind of portfolio job within a job). Overall, I found that Essentialism matched a lot of principles that I have been trying to adopt – doing things deliberately rather than accidentally, simplifying things as much as possible, trying to mono-task and remain in the moment as much as possible etc.
Whilst I enjoyed the book, I did feel that it became a bit confused as it went along. There were quite a few chapters that were not so much about Essentialism but, rather, seemed more like general productivity, self-management advice and I got the impression that McKeown was really just writing a general book about improving personal productivity but used the neat idea of Essentialism to hang things off even when the fit was not so good. I suppose the difficulty was that a book that explains ‘less is better’ really only needs to be very short and, so, would be unlikely to be very sellable.
Tim O'Hare 