Productive Simplicity = (Life + Goals) - Distraction

Every bit of advice on life and time management can be broken down to a single fundamental idea: know what is important to achieving your goals, focus accordingly, and ignore all else.  Do you have stuff in your home that you do not use?  Get rid of it.  Do you have features in your product that are not essential to your customer’s needs?  These features are only adding complexity to your product and confusing your customers in the process.  Mercilessly eradicate all the needless clutter, distraction and time sinks out of your life and suddenly everything else, the important stuff, becomes far more manageable.

The whole concept of doing less as a way of accomplishing more is actually quite simple.  The hard part is figuring out what you want to accomplish and then identifying the tasks that are truly important to get you there.  Many people also confuse urgency with importance.  Never drop a task of high importance for an seemingly urgent inconsequential one.  During most tasks only 20% of the activities surrounding it are truly important; the other 80% are just excess trivialities that can be ignored.  One of the most vital skills you can have in life is figuring out which one is which.

Productive Simplicity = (Life + Goals) - Distraction

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