The+Power+of+LESS+2010年10月31日+编辑打印版

“BABAUTA HAS BECOME A POWERHOUSE OF ONLINE PRODUCTIVITY FOR GOOD REASON: HIS MANTRA WORKS.” —TIMOTHY FERRISS, AUTHOR OH THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK The Power of LESS the fine art of limiting yourself to the essential. . . in business and in life Leo Babauta Leo Babauta CONTENTS Introduction v PART I: THE PRINCIPLES 1. Why Less Is Powerful 3 2.The Art of Setting Limits 11 3. Choosing the Essential, and Simplifying 17 4. Simple Focus 25 5. Create New Habits, and the Power of Less Challenge 33 6. Start Small 39 PART II: IN PRACTICE 7. Simple Goals and Projects 45 8. Simple Tasks 57 9. Simple Time Management 61 CONTENTS 10. Simple E-mail　 71 11. Simple Internet 　 83 12. Simple Filing 91 13. Simple Commitments 99 14. Simple Daily Routine 113 15. Declutter Your Work Space 119 16. Slow Down 131 17. Simple Health and Fitness 143 18. On Motivation 159 Acknowledgments 171 About the Author Credits Cover Copyright INTRODUCTION T HERE HAS NEVER BEFORE been an age in which we could get so much done so quickly. There also has never before been an age in which we were so overwhelmed with information and tasks, so overloaded with e-mails and things to read and watch, so stressed by the incredible demands of our lives. For many people these days, work is a constant stream of e-mails, of news and requests, of phone calls and instant mes- sages, of papers and notes and files. The day starts with an in-box full of e-mails, and ends with an in-box just as full, and each e-mail represents a request for information or for actions that we don't have time to fulfill. We are drinking from a fire hose of information, with no idea of how to reduce the flow. It's stressful and wasteful. And if we stop to think about it, it's not how we want to spend our lives. FINDING CALM IN THE CHAOS What's the alternative to information and task overload? Must we follow the example of Thoreau, and build a cabin in the woods, shutting ourselves off from society and modern technology? I propose a middle ground: one where we can still enjoy ac- cess to vast amounts of information, still have instant commu- nication when we want it, still get things done quickly—but one in which we choose how much we consume and do. A simpler life, but one in which we accomplish the things we want to ac- complish. The solution lies in setting limits to how much we consume and do. It lies in making the most of our time by focusing on the most important things, instead of everything. Picture a life in which you have a fairly peaceful workday, where stress levels are minimal, where you're able to focus on your work. Imagine that you only do a few tasks, but they're chosen so that they have the most impact. You accomplish major goals without the stress of doing everything at once. It might sound idyllic, but it's definitely achievable. I've done it using a system that's very easy to implement. It all comes down to making choices. SIMPLICITY I'm a firm believer in simplicity. My life is better when I sim- plify it, when I cut down on the noise and I'm able to enjoy the things I love. My work is better when I cut out the distractions and I'm able to focus. My writing is more powerful when I can eliminate excess words and use only those words needed to con- vey my core ideas. Simplicity means a lot of things in different contexts. For some, it means going back to using raw materials instead of manufactured ones, building and making everything yourself instead of buying it, doing everything yourself instead of rely- ing on others. While that definition holds a lot of appeal for me, the simplicity I seek in my life is simplicity in what I do. Do less, not more, but achieve more because of the choices I make. Simplicity boils down to two steps: 1. Identify the essential. 2. Eliminate the rest. In this book, we'll talk about a lot of ways to apply those two steps to various areas of your work and personal life, but we'll always come back to those two ideas: Focus on the essential and allow everything else to drop away. It'll make you much happier, less stressed, and perhaps sur- prisingly, more productive. HOW IT WORKED FOR ME Only a few years ago, I was over my head in debt, with a work schedule that rarely allowed me to see my family and had me stressed to maximum levels every day. I was overweight and unhealthy, I was eating fried and fatty and salty and greasy INTRODUCTION foods every day, I wasn't exercising, and I was a smoker. I was unhappy at work and going nowhere, fast. My life was compli- cated, and I didn't have time for the things I loved. So I made a choice: I decided to simplify. I decided to make positive changes. It started with quitting smoking—I focused on that first, and only that. I poured all of my energy into this one goal, and an amazing thing happened: That focused energy allowed me to break through the initial barriers of quitting, which I'd failed at numerous times before. Beating that barrier helped inspire me to new goals and hab- its, and I used the same method on each one: I'd focus all of my energy and attention on that one challenge, and the barriers would break down. I'd focus on one goal at a time (I call it my "One Goal") and not try to accomplish everything at once. Through this method, over the last several years, I've been able to: 1. Take up running 2. Begin eating healthier 3. Become organized and productive 4. Train for and run two marathons 5. Work two jobs and double my income 6. Become an early riser (I wake at 4 a.m.) 7. Become a vegetarian 8. Complete two triathlons 9. Start a successful blog—Zen Habits 10. Completely eliminate my debt 11. Save a substantial emergency fund for the first time 12. Simplify my life 13. Declutter my home 14. Lose forty-plus pounds 15. Write and sell two successful e-books 16. Write the first draft of a novel 17. Quit my day job and work from home 18. Start a successful second blog, Write To Done, for writers 19. Publish this book And I've done all of that while raising and making time for six beautiful kids. That may sound like a lot, but I accomplished all of this in small steps, one thing at a time. Again, I used the concept of One Goal—I focused on only one goal at a time, and put all of my energy into it. My blog, Zen Habits, which documents how I've reached these goals, is now in the top fifty blogs in the world, with more than sixty thousand subscribers and about two million readers a month. Many of my readers have asked me how I can do so much, given that I have the same number of hours in the day as everyone else. My answer: It's a matter of placing limits, and focusing on the essential. THE SIX PRINCIPLES OF SIMPLE PRODUCTIVITY Part I of this book will explore the six guiding principles of the Power of Less—the ideas that will help you to maximize your productivity while simplifying your life. These Power of Less Principles will reappear throughout the book: 1. Set limitations. 2. Choose the essential. 3. Simplify. 4. Focus. 5. Create habits. 6. Start small. In Part II of this book, the Power of Less in Practice, we'll take a look at practical tips for implementing these principles in key areas, from your work to your personal life. WHAT THIS BOOK WILL DO First, let me tell you what this book won't do: It won't teach you exactly how to write a novel or run a marathon or quit smoking. This isn't a how-to manual to do any of that. This is a how-to manual on how to simplify and focus on the essential. How to do less while accomplishing more. How to focus and use that focus to achieve your goals, no matter what they are. It's about limitations rather than volume. Each chapter of this book is designed to teach you how to focus on less and to use that focus to be more powerful in dif- ferent areas of your life. You'll learn to simplify what you do, to reduce the volume of your tasks and projects and communica- tion and information. You'll learn to reduce the clutter in your life so that you're less stressed and more productive. You'll learn how simplicity can be extremely powerful and how to use that to accomplish your goals, one at a time. You'll learn how to create a more tranquil workday and envi- ronment, no matter where you work. This is a book about less, and how focusing on less can transform your life. And it's not an abstract book, either: It will give you very practical advice about how to put the concept of less into action, every day. Part I the PRINCIPLES one Why Less Is Powerful W E LIVE IN a world where, more often than not, more is better. We are after more money, to buy bigger houses and cars, and more clothes and gad- gets and furniture. We need bigger shopping malls rather than the small shops of yesterday. We consume more, and we pro- duce more, and we do more than ever before. At some point, however, we run into limits. There is only so much we can do or consume. There are a finite number of hours in a day, and once we reach that limit to our production, we can't do more. Many people see these limits as problems, while others see them as a challenge: How can I squeeze more into my day? If I manage my time effectively and learn to be more productive, can I get more done in the limited number of hours available to me? The problem with constantly trying to increase volume is that it doesn't always produce the best results. Doing a huge number of things doesn't mean you're getting anything mean- ingful done. In fact, it's so hit-and-miss that it's almost like playing a game of roulette: If you do enough tasks, one of them is bound to pay off big. It doesn't work that way. Doing more things means you're likely to do a lot of unimportant things, and you'll be over- worked and stressed at the same time. Imagine two reporters working at a newspaper: One goes for a high volume of articles each week, and the other decides to do only one. The reporter writing thirty articles a week scans a vast amount of sources for any little bit of information that's re- motely interesting, turning each into a short, quick, and fairly limited article that doesn't get much attention. His editor is pleased by the amount of work he's doing, and he gets rewarded with praise. The second reporter decides that if he's just going to do one article this week, he'd better make it count. He spends half of the first day researching and brainstorming and thinking until he chooses a high-impact story that he knows will knock people's socks off. It'll be an article that wins awards. He spends two days researching it and another couple days writing it and checking facts. Guess what happens? Not only does he produce the best ar- ticle of the week, but it becomes an award-winning article, one that the readers love and that gets him a promotion and long- term and widespread recognition. From that article, and others like it, he can build a career. The first reporter was thinking high-volume, but short-term. The second reporter focused on less, but it did much more over the long term. That's the Power of Less. THE LESSONS OF THE HAIKU The fairly popular form of Japanese poetry known as the haiku has a couple of interesting lessons to teach us about why less is powerful. The haiku, as you may know, is usually a nature-re- lated poem of just seventeen syllables, written in three lines (five syllables, then seven, then five). A poet writing a haiku must work with those limitations, must express an entire idea or image in only that number of syllables. It can be a daunting task if you have something important to convey. So the haiku poet has a couple of choices: He can quickly whip out seventeen syllables and have a completed haiku in a short amount of time; or he can carefully choose only the essen- tial words and images needed to convey his idea. And this sec- ond choice is what creates some of the most powerful poetry in such a limited form—choosing only the essential. So the les- sons we can pick up from the haiku are the first two principles of simple productivity: Principle 1: By setting limitations, we must choose the essential. So in everything you do, learn to set limitations. Principle 2: By choosing the essential, we create great impact with minimal resources. Always choose the essential to maxi- mize your time and energy. These two lessons form the key to this book. They are the Power of Less in two sentences. Everything after this is simply an exploration of these concepts, or practical ways to apply them to many areas of your life. CHOOSING THINGS WITH THE MOST IMPACT In our work lives, we can be like the first reporter in the exam- ple above, cranking out tasks like crazy, and we'll probably get a whole lot done and be praised for it. People like to see hard workers who will handle anything thrown at them. However, we can make another choice: We can be like the second reporter and choose to do fewer things, but things with the most impact. What does that mean, "the most impact"? A task or project could be "high-impact" in a number of different ways. It could: 〮get you long-term recognition; 〮make you a lot of money in the long run; 〮be highly beneficial to your company, in terms of revenues, branding, expanding into new areas, etc.; 〮change your career or have the potential to greatly advance your career; 〮change your personal life in some important way; or 〮contribute to society or humanity in general. These are just some examples—you can probably think of other ways a task or project can be high-impact. How can you determine which tasks have the most impact? There are generally two good ways of doing this. 1. Examine your task list. Take a look at everything on your list and ask yourself the following questions about each one: Will this have an impact that will last beyond this week or this month? How will it change my job, my career, my life? How will this further a long-term goal of mine? How impor- tant is that goal? From these answers, you can determine which items will have the most impact over the long term. While this sounds like a tedious process, it actually gets very easy with practice, and soon you'll be able to do it in just a few minutes. 2.Start with your goals. If you start by identifying the things you really want to accomplish in the next year, you can plan your tasks so that you are doing things each day to further those goals along. Let's say you have three long-term goals— each day, choose a task from your list that will move you closer to those goals. This will ensure that you are completing the tasks with the most impact, because they relate directly to a long-term goal. Which of these two methods should you use? Whichever method works for you. We'll talk more about working with goals and tasks in later chapters, but for now I just want to point out that it's not an either/or choice. You can try a combination of both of the above methods, and in fact, I think that's necessary. You can do your best to plan for your goals, but even the best of us has tasks outside of those goals that must be completed. All your tasks will pile up in a long list (if you're careful to write them down) and the non-goal tasks can easily push back your goal tasks. What you'll need to do is do a review of your task list (method number one above) to choose the high-impact tasks, instead of trying to tackle everything regardless of how mean- ingful the tasks are to your life. APPLYING LIMITATIONS TO EVERY ASPECT OF LIFE The lessons of the haiku, of applying limitations in order to force choices, of choosing the essential and finding the Power of Less—these are lessons we can apply not only to the tasks on our to-do lists, but to everything in our lives. If there's any area of your life that is overwhelming you, and that you'd like to sim- plify, apply limitations. Have too many e-mails in your in-box? Apply a limitation: You'll only check e-mail twice a day, and only respond to five e-mails each time. You'll be forced to work more effectively, and only write important e-mails. Have too many projects? Limit them to three. Have too much stuff in your house? Limit yourself to two hundred items. You get the idea. We'll explore these different areas in more detail and see how the lessons of the haiku can transform these areas of your life into something powerful and meaningful, but for now, it helps to ask yourself the following questions: 〮Which areas of my life are overwhelming? 〮What would I like to simplify? 〮In addition to the tasks I need to accomplish in different areas, do I want to limit the number of possessions I have, what information I receive, or what responsibilities I have? These are just preliminary questions for now; we'll explore this in more detail and figure out what's essential and what isn't as we get into the following chapters. two The Art of Setting Limits M OST OF us lead lives filled with too much stuff, too much information, too many papers, too much to do, too much clutter. Unfortunately, our time and space is limited, and having too much of everything is like trying to cram a library into a single box: It can't be done, it's hard to en- joy the books, and sooner or later the box will break. Our problem is living without limits. It's like going shop- ping without spending limits—you tend to go overboard and end up with a bunch of stuff you don't need or really want much. But if you have a budget (say one hundred dollars), you'll choose only the things that matter, and you'll end up with much less junk. Our entire lives are like this: We live without limits. And while that freedom can seem fun at first, after a while it gets to be too much. We don't have enough room for everything. We can't handle the stress of trying to do everything. We just can't fit it in our lives, no matter how much we'd like to do so. It weakens us in so many ways. It dilutes our power and ef- fectiveness. It spreads us too thin. It tires us out so that we don't have the energy to handle the important stuff. A life without limits is taking a cup of red dye and pouring it into the ocean, and watching the color dilute into nothingness. Limited focus is putting that same cup of dye into a gallon of water. Limitless is the pitcher who pitches nine innings every three days, throwing as many pitches as he can, as hard as he can. Soon he's too tired to pitch very hard, if at all. The real power is when that same pitcher comes in for one inning every three days and can mow down the batters every time. Limitless is trying to excavate an entire acre of land with a single shovel. Limited focus is digging with that same shovel in one spot until you hit water. Limitless is weak. Learn to focus yourself with limits, and you'll increase your strength. In this chapter, we'll explore Prin- ciple 1. Setting Limits. HOW LIMITS CAN HELP Going from a limitless life that's overwhelming and not very effective to a life with limits, focus, and power is an incredible transformation. Here are just a few benefits of setting limits on everything you do: 〮It simplifies things. Your life becomes more manageable and less stressful. 〮It focuses you. Instead of diluting yourself, you focus your energy on a smaller number of things. 〮It focuses on what's important. Instead of trying to do everything and not having enough time for the impor- tant things in your life, you do only what's important to you. That's an incredible change for most people. 〮It helps you achieve. Many times, when we are spread too thin, we only make incremental progress on important projects and goals. But if we focus on just a few impor- tant things, we can actually complete them. You'll achieve much more by focusing on the essential. 〮It shows others that your time is important. When we try to take on everything that comes our way, the people around us get the message that their time is more im- portant than ours, that we'll say yes to whatever re- quests they have. If, however, we have firm limits on what we do, we send the message that we value our time and our