Cal Newport explains how to cut low-value habits and streamline what's left. Triage your daily tasks, eliminate the ones that don't matter, then optimize the few that do. Focus on activities with outsized returns instead of chasing busyness.
Once you conceive of your life as having these different processes, like here's all the different things the factory that is me produces, you're able to do two things, triage and optimize. And so triaging is really useful, actually, to write down. Here's all the different things I'm involved with that I have to repeatedly come back to, that requires me to coordinate with others and produce value. You might say, you know what, I can get rid of half of these. So I love that. Triage element is a really important tool to really keep getting back to the basics. Here's the things that really move the needle in my work, here's the things that really move the needle in my community engagement, in my family engagement, and my own engagement with the world. And then you can start doing the optimize aspect where you say, how do I implement this process without it taking over my brain space, without it making me be on my phone all the time, without it making me have to answer 30 emails a week or this or that? And then you add that layer of optimization on top of it. It's as if you're a factory that produces all these valuable things and you're making that factory three times faster at producing value. You're like a value production factory in your life and you bring a little bit of this process engineering mindset and you don't want to go overboard, you don't want to get too fiddly, and you don't want everything to be automated. Zapier airtable configurations. Let's not go overbo. But as just a general mindset of break things down in the processes, get rid of the ones I don't really need, not the big wins, and then let's get smart about the ones that exist. It is night and day compared to an approach where you just sort of have at it. Fire up my inboxes, fire up my text messages, fire up my slack and just rock and roll and kind of try to make it through the day and be busy. And you know, it's completely night and day when you're like, nope, I do this, this, this and this, and here's how I do it. It unlocks so much more in your life outside of work, your life in work, you produce more value, you're there for people in a better way, you're more dependable. So that would be my new tool. I would add to the conversation is you're a factory, make it a better factory.
So excited to optimize. Oh, how can I make this more efficient? Et cetera. But oftentimes that triage component can be tough. Well, do I really. I don't know that I can stop doing this. I feel like there's social pressure for me to do this thing or it's harder. In my experience and what I've heard from others is that triage components then like letting things go and allowing the. All the things that we are doing to be simplified and you know, the wave of the hand, I just eliminate half or whatever it is. That's easy and conceptually and then hard to do actually in practice. Do you have. And I'm sure there's a lot in the book too, but top of mind around, how do we approach that triage component, the triage component and allow ourselves to get rid of those things that we really shouldn't be doing?
Yeah, I mean, this is. It's critical. I mean, a great book on this is my friend Greg McKeown has this book, Essentialism, which gets at this in the world of work. I get into this a little bit in the context of technology and digital minimalism, but it is critical. And one thing that helps here is the psychology. So if you think about there's returns, roughly speaking, on these different things, these processes you can be involved in. And typically these returns are. They're not linear, it's more like they're exponential or on a power law type scale. So there's some things that give you a lot of value and then a lot of things that give you a little bit of value. The thing is, they all take time, is time for each of them. Right. And so if you only have so much time available, this would be really simple if you have 10 units of time available, if you have eight of those units going towards things to give you a little bit of value and two of those units going to something that gives you a ton of value. And then you instead just get rid of those little things, give you a little bit of value, and just do more of the thing that gives you big value. You are substantially increasing the amount of value in your life. In other words, spending more time on the things that you know for sure are big wins is always going to be the best strategy versus having those big wins being swamped out by a lot of little wins. Right. Because it's huge amount of value doing this, a little bit of value doing this. But an hour at this and an hour at this, you're going to get so much more over here. So that mindset I think helps. It's an unequal distribution of Value. And so though you do want to do some exploration, you do want to do some experimentation, you want to fill as much of your time as possible with the things that you already know for sure are really important, and trying to pump up the value of the things you really know are important. I think too often we're in a mindset of fear of missing out or exploration. Like, I don't know, like I could. I heard that someone once, you know, found a client on TikTok, and so, man, I should probably be on there. But wait, that hour you spent on TikTok is an hour you could have spent going for a walk. You have a regular standing date to go for a walk with a good friend of yours in the woods that you know for sure is going to be off the charts important and meaningful and valuable to you, you know, and you gave that up for, maybe I'll get a little bit of value one day out of being on TikTok. So I think that mindset shift really helps. I think getting away from busyness as a proxy for productivity really helps. Like, having lots of things to do doesn't mean anything. No one ever built an empire out of their email response times. Gmail is never going to send you a giant check. They're not going to say, you know, michael, Congratulations, you sent 3,000 emails this week. You're on it. You're crushing it. Here's $20,000, right? No value is directly created by just this frenzy. So I think having mindset of busyness is orthogonal from value production in the world of work. I think that helps as well. So these mindset shifts. I want to take the things that matter, the big swings, and make that swing even harder. Once you have that mindset shift, it's much easier. You just see things differently. You're like, no, I mean, that's fine. That's interesting, but it's not a big swing. Get out of here. Oh, that's okay. But it's negligible value. Get out of here. And so that mindset shift makes it a lot easier.
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