In his 2014 book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown asserts that we can ultimately be much more effective in our life’s pursuits when we allow ourselves to focus on and prioritize the small set of endeavors that are truly most important to us.
By letting go of commitments of lesser importance, we free up our energy to pursue our true priorities to the best of our ability. Rather than spread our attention thin, we focus it.
When we are overcommitted, the greater volume of work has a higher energy cost than a smaller volume of work. That’s the obvious part. But there’s a hidden energy cost as well: the energy we exert switching between tasks, trying to remember so much different information, and making compromises and trade-offs between our various commitments.
This is what many psychologists refer to as the “switch cost effect.” When we constantly shift between a multitude of disparate tasks, we build up attention residue throughout our minds. Our attention clings to other endeavors. It’s as if our minds are in ten places at once and never fully in any one.
Imagine your brain is a computer. Every project you keep open is a different program consuming RAM. Soon, you have dozens of windows stacked on top of one another. You don’t know where anything is. And eventually, the whole system freezes, and you lose all your work. Sometimes when we uninstall oversized, buggy programs from our lives, we free up inordinate amounts of energy for whatever is left.
Essentialism, in this way, is a powerful recipe for greater effectiveness in our life’s pursuits. But it is also a foundational practice in cultivating peace. So much of our stress and internal pressure comes from the sheer number of tasks, projects, and relationships we try to pursue. Through this chaotic pursuit of more, we end up doing nothing particularly well, and we burn ourselves out in the process.
You don’t need to do it all. You cannot do it all. The world does not need or want you to do it all. It needs you to do your thing, in your lane — fully, sustainably, well, and from a quiet, but radical peace beaming out from behind your eyes.
