the bossbabe podcast - 168. The Essential Ways To Simplify Your Schedule With Greg McKeown

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Have you ever taken an inventory of how you spend your time?  After you respond to emails, answer Slack threads and wrap up your Zoom meetings, you could go the whole day without ever moving the needle for the things that matter most.  It can feel so discouraging. But what if instead, you had room in your schedule to do the work that really matters? What if you could consistently get into a creative headspace and build momentum towards your goals? On this week’s episode, Natalie Ellis is chatting with one of our all-time favorite authors: Greg McKeown. Greg’s books, Essentialism and Effortless, have become our BossBabe go-to reads for getting clear on priorities, increasing productivity and ensuring we spend our time and energy intentionally.  If you’re hoping to create more space in your life, Greg’s processes will lay a foundation for you to simplify your schedule and start to build a daily routine that really works. Links: Episode with Dr. Casey Means https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bossbabe-podcast/id1453389736?i=1000517277453 Back door access to Levels: https://www.levelshealth.com/NATALIE Follow:  BossBabe: @bossbabe.inc Natalie: @iamnatalie Danielle: @daniellecanty Greg McKeown: @gregorymckeown

Whatever you're trying to do, have a lower bound, but also an upper bound so that you can make solid progress without burning out. Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance and learning how to balance it all. I'm CEO and co-founder of Boss Babe, Natalie, and I am joined by Danielle. Hello there. So I was totally fangirling over this episode. So basically I read Greg's book Essentialism a long time ago, and I've gotten pretty much everyone I know hooked on it. It is so incredible. And Danielle, I know you've loved it as well. I know. Can I just also highlight, back in the day when we were younger, we used to like fangirl over good looking men when we were a teenager. Yeah, Britney Spears. Yeah, she was

yopping up. And now we're like fangirling over authors because we're just those types of women. We're like, oh my God, they're amazing. They're brains. So yeah, it's just making me laugh. You know, I really never fangirled over that many guys when I was younger. It was like Mary-Kate and Ashley and Britney Spears. I think I've always been such a girls girl. Mine was Will Smith.

If I ever meet Will Smith oh my goodness yes oh my god that is hilarious good times so yeah in this interview we're interviewing Greg McKeon he is actually from the UK but he lives in LA he's's an author, public speaker, leadership, and business strategist. So his first book, Essentialism, was really about teaching us to cut the noise and focus on one thing where energy flows, energy goes, that whole thing. And I talk a little bit about that book in the interview, but the thing I really wanted to get into was his new book. It's called Effortless and

it's about you know cutting a say you've got a really long process really looking at that and being like do say it's a podcast process that's one of the things he actually talks about in his book it's like 20 steps do I really need those 20 steps is that is those extra 10 steps actually getting me any more return if I cut them down what would happen and I thought that was really interesting and one thing I really wanted to get into on the podcast was like how do you balance that right how do you balance having processes and and all these things in place to get results how do you balance that and also wanting to do less how can you still get good results and we had a really good conversation about it I know you couldn't be there Danielle but um after listening it's just really interesting how it you just sometimes need someone else to reframe that and show you that

someone's successful to show you that actually doing more doesn't necessarily make you more yeah because I think sometimes in society there's this misconception of the you know to achieve something you have to do that hustle and you have to work really, really hard. And yes, you do. And also you can look for simpler ways of doing things. Just because you choose to complicate a process does not mean that it's going to be like bring higher rewards.

And if you look for the simplest way to that process, and I think that's what he really sings home in the book, I is really really powerful and you know just like his first book essentialism which was all around like doing like utilizing that energy that you have and put it into fewer things will actually get you further than if you disperse it over lots of areas it's a very similar concepts as well like do less but do it better and lean into those things so yeah it was I was so gutted so gutted that I couldn't be there but when I listened I made a ton of notes yeah and sometimes I see you know people on Instagram saying you know it's not about the hustle it's about self-care and all those things and manifestation and And then I take a look at their businesses and

I'm like, I don't want a business like that. It doesn't look like you're really getting results. It doesn't look like sitting manifesting all day is really getting you where you want to be. And yes, I think there's an element of that, but I really want to take advice from people who walk the walk, who are where I want to go versus taking advice from just random people on social media telling you to slow down. So that's why I really love this interview. And he's worked with some incredible people over the years. He is so sought after in Silicon Valley in the tech world. So I know you're going to love it. So we'll dive straight in and I would love it to share your biggest takeaways. If you've read essentialism, let me know and let me know if you're going to

read this one. And also like not just share your takeaways, but think around what you can implement in your life straight away. I think commit to that and share that with us is going to actually move the needle for you even more. Yeah, love it. Let's dive in. A boss babe is unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise, keep going and fighting on. She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself. Confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own vision of success. Greg, welcome to the podcast. I feel like this is long overdue. I've been a big fan of your work for a really long time. So to kick us off,

could you just tell anyone that perhaps hasn't read any of your books a little bit about you? Oh, my name is Greg McKeown. I'm married to Anna. I have four children. I live in California, wrote a book called Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, which has done better than expected and certainly surprised my mother. And it's about how to figure out what is essential, eliminate what's not, and then make it easier to do the things that matter most. That's essentialism. The antidote to the problem of the undisciplined pursuit of more is the disciplined pursuit of less. And now, as you mentioned, Effortless is a new book that I've just written. And I think of it as being like a cousin to essentialism. You can read them

standalone, separately. You'll appreciate this. It's a bit presumptuous of an example, but I think of them a little bit like how Paul McCartney and John Lennon both produced music separately, but the magic happened when they were together in the Beatles. And I think these books, they complement each other. Essentialism in one word is prioritization. Effortless in one word would be simplification. Oh, I love that. The one word thing. And the biggest thing that stood out to me in Essentialism, which is something that I constantly draw the diagram of for my team, my team draw it for me, whenever we get off track is, I don't know, it's called the energy diagram, basically, where it's the same amount of energy. And you can either

expend small amounts of it in many different directions, or the same amount of it in one direction. That when I seen it just blew my mind. And I remember showing my whole team. And it's one of those things I have to continually remind myself of, but it's been a game changer. Can you explain what I'm talking about a little bit better? I mean, I struggle with exactly the diagram that you're describing. I mean, the way that that diagram came to be is that I was coaching a leader who was interested in everything, had the cursive capability. He's chasing every new shiny object. On his way to work in the morning, he would be listening to some radio show or some tech show. And by the time he got there, he'd be all revved

up and he'd be saying, okay, instead of what we were going to do, we should be doing this thing today. And he'd just be taking us in all different directions. And I was listening to what he was describing and I just drew a little circle and then lots of arrows coming out, pointing in every direction. And they're little arrows because you can only make so much progress if you're trying to do lots and lots of different things at the same time. And then next to it, I drew a circle the same size, but one arrow that goes really high up. And the basis of it, I drew this out and I said, does that look familiar to you? Do you relate to this? I was trying to restate his experience in a graphical

format and he just put his head in his hands and he's like, Greg, that is my entire life. That's the problem. And I've come to discover that it's not just him, that a lot of people feel busy but not productive, stretched too thin at work or at home, feel like their day is being hijacked by other people's agenda for them. The first image, this circle with many different arrows, when you make just a millimeter progress, but it's in a thousand different directions. And so you don't actually break through to the next level of contribution, even though you're doing a lot of stuff and you might be doing it with a lot of passion. You might even be capable at it. In fact, you might have the curse of capability. That is, I can do all sorts of things.

But all of that adds up to a recipe. You start plateauing your progress because you're just trying to do everything. And so you can either be average at many different things, or you could become superb at just a few things. And my experience is that if you do that latter, if you do just a few things, you can actually make a lot more progress. And that's why the arrow goes so high. And what about for perhaps the entrepreneurs listening who are nodding along like, yep, that is 1 million percent me. But they have this worry of turning down opportunities, leaving money on the table, letting people down if they're not responding to everything or saying yes to everything. And they might be sitting in a place of confusion, really not sure what

prioritization looks like and what things that they should be focusing on, where would they start? Well, I'm sympathetic to that problem. I'm an entrepreneur myself, and I feel some of the same tension is that every opportunity feels like a good opportunity. Everything feels like it ought to be a yes. The inclination for an entrepreneur is to say yes to everything. And if you could say yes to everything, maybe that's the right thing to do if you really could just do everything. But the problem is you can't. That's the first thing to sort of accept is that the idea that you can do it all. And if you can do it all, then you'll have it all, is based in a lie. It's a bill of goods. We've been sold something that does not fulfill what it says on the packaging. If you try to do everything as an entrepreneur, you will not get

everything. You will get burned out and exhausted, and you still won't have achieved the things you want to achieve. So what can you do about it? I think the first thing to do is to create some space to just explore, to be thinking, to be looking at your business rather than just running it. And one entrepreneur, it was a very successful business that he was running. He'd been brought in to run it. So it's a little different than a startup situation, but it was the former CEO of LinkedIn. But one of the things he was doing as he's growing this high growth organization is he said, I'm going to put four increments of 30 minutes on my calendar every day, just blank. So that whatever else is going on, I'm going to have some space just to think. And as a result of that, he just didn't feel frantic and frenetic all the time.

He was able to have a pace in his day that was sustainable. And it also allowed him just to think for a bit. And so that's really the first thing to do is to create a bit of space. Maybe it's the way that he did it. Or maybe you say, okay, I'm going to carve out a time, even once a quarter, you say, okay, I'm going to try and take some time. What I do now, I used to try and do once a quarter, but what I do now is every six months, I'll take two days to do this, to really try and look at my life, examine it, what's going right, what's working,

what would the next level goals be? If I could only achieve one thing over the next six months in my business, what would it be? And you're just trying to get clearer from a bigger term perspective. So that's how I apply the explore thing. The second thing they can do is start eliminating. And you eliminate the non-essential stuff first. Just look at the

stuff that you look at and you're like, this is providing no value. This really isn't helping me get to where I'm trying to get to. You might make a list, for example, of the 10 things that take most of your time as an entrepreneur and just circle the three things that really produce results for you. And then look at the rest and say, is there any way I can just not do it? Is there any way if it really is still maintenance, it's something that if I don't do, it will become a problem over time. Can I outsource it to someone? Can I simplify it so I'm doing less energy on it? And so those are sort of the two things I would start to say, create space to do

the exploration, to have some thinking time, but then also start to get rid of the stuff. Even if you don't know definitely what your yeses are, at least start with the things that are no's for you. You're like, no, that isn't, I don't even want to do that. That's a project that somebody else thinks I should do, but I don't want to do it. It's not the thing that I want to do. It's just places that you're wasting time. Those are the two things I would say to start with. Yeah, I really like that.

And I love the idea of a self audit. So like you say, looking at where you're spending time and circle what produces results and what doesn't. And I've done that myself by using time tracking software over a week and tracked my time automatically to see where I was spending time. And by the end of the week, I was so shocked to see how much time I'd spent on things that really weren't moving the needle for me. So if anyone's email, Slack, just responding to other people's priorities, I was just so shocked at how much time i was spending on that um or maybe taking instagram quotes and designing them versus

just outsourcing the design of it there were just so many things that would be 10 minutes here five minutes here but over the course of a week it just added up so much i've been making that same mistake in my life recently, where there's so much going on with the new book launch that it's quite exciting. So responding to people, it is a good thing. You are working generally on the priority, right? That is my career priority right now. However, there've been more important work within the launch that I just have never got to. There were articles I could have written, which would have been high profile, were like bigger bets that I just never did it. And if I'd organized myself differently And if I'd organized myself differently, if I protected myself differently, then I think I could have done those things. So this is one, I want to say like, yeah, I'm in this with everybody. I mean, this is an ongoing thing that the subtitle is the pursuit of less. It's an ongoing disciplined pursuit, but also just how vital it is to put

space and protect it for that work, for doing something meaningful. I have a project that I want to get done by the end of this week. It's the most important thing I can do this week. Actually, I think it might be the most important thing I can do this week. I was about to give it a different caveat, but I literally still haven't actually scheduled when I'm going to do it. And that's because of lots of good things. But you see, that's the risk. The essentialist doesn't spend time on a good thing instead of an essential thing. The essentialist is saying, how do I make sure that the essential of time, but the stuff that's good, but not the essential, not those sort of 10%, like the 90% or above important tasks. The thing that you say, if I do this, it's going to make a big difference. Every time you say yes to something that's good, a 50%, a 60% yes, you're saying no to something that's actually going to be a game changer. And that's what you have to start developing a heightened awareness of and start to make changes around.

Because otherwise, you're going to start plateauing in the progress because you're like, well, I'm just doing lots of the good things, but the really things that would move the needle aren't even getting addressed. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place. So it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit

of spring cleaning in your business, you know, get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible possible I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students so if you're listening and haven't checked out Kajabi yet now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss Babe listeners a 30-day free trial go to kajabi.com slash boss babe to claim your 30-day free trial that's kajabi.com slash Boss Babe to claim your 30-day free trial. That's Kajabi that is doing these things. And I really like that. And going back to talking about simplifying things, one thing that I loved in your new book was your Zencaster process. So for anyone listening, Zencaster is the software that we also use to record podcasts. And you were talking about how you had this really long process

and you were able to simplify it to just a couple of steps. So for someone who sees, okay, they've taken a 17-step process and turned it into two steps and starts to worry, because this also crossed my mind too, starts to worry about, well, will that reduce the quality of my podcast? Will it mean that I'm not prepped as much? How would you decide on making those trade-offs when you're simplifying processes? Well, I think that every choice has a trade-off. And typically, we just don't see the trade-off involved in growing complexity.

We just think, oh, it's better because I'm doing more. The more must be better. And we just add and add for good motives. We think, oh, this will help. This will be an even higher quality. This will be, this will be. And we don't see that that's coming at a cost. And so if we become perfectionist about it, especially, it can really keep us from getting things done, getting the right things done. I mean, it's not enough to know what's essential. It's not enough to get rid of the non-essential. I mean, you've actually got to get the important work done, finished, so that you can move on to the next thing and not just be juggling 20 different half-finished projects. And so I would encourage an entrepreneur to apply an 80%

test and say, well, what is an 80% like the best I can do right now. We're 80% satisfied because you'll never get to 100%. There's no such thing. And you can spin your wheels and make things so much more complex and overthink and over-engineer and just keep adding and adding and never ship it. Never get the thing done. I mean, I know of people that want to do podcasts and I know of someone who talked to me about starting a podcast right when I was starting mine and they still haven't started theirs. And I'm coming up on a year now of the What's Essential podcast. It just came, this is just recent news, but just became a top 10 self-improvement podcast on Apple, which we're very pleased about. And all the while, this other colleague hasn't started. Now, let's just think about it. Now, what did I need to do

to do that? There was a really important decision. And I have to admit, it was quite an uncomfortable decision for me. And the decision was this. Do I have the courage to be rubbish? It meant that like the first episode I ever did, I never used because the recording was so bad. I was in the midst of the pandemic. I had the equipment. I couldn't even buy any equipment, right? All the shops are closed.

There's no way to get, you couldn't buy anything online because again, people were suddenly grabbing all of this equipment and you just couldn't even order it there. So I had this old microphone I came across. It sounded terrible. I tried to do it the first, the complex way that you were referencing. And it was just a whole thing was a mess. I don't mind that it was a mess. I just, I started to say, well, why is it a mess? Are you trying to do too many steps and so on? Next episode I did with somebody. Okay. There's, I simplified the process. So I'm not going to try and do all the bells and whistles. Still the audio wasn't great, but okay. That's good enough. We're going to go with this. We're

going to start and we're going to learn by doing rather than learn to do you do to learn and yeah and that process that process is is is what has so here i am now as i say sort of a year on like i've learned all sorts of things i still so much i don't know about this you know running a podcast but we're learning it because we're doing it. Okay, I want to share with something with you that totally blew my mind. I used to think that so many of the things I was experiencing with my health had to do with my hormones, because honestly, hormones got talked about all the time in the health space. But the reality is, so much of what I was experiencing had to do with my metabolic health and how my body was responding to the foods that I ate. So digging into this a little bit deeper, what I mean by that is I got diagnosed with

polycystic ovarian syndrome and I was for a long time really treating the hormones as the problem. But when I dove into it, I actually realized that my PCOS came from what's called insulin resistance. The only reason I was able to figure that out was because I started wearing a continuous glucose monitoring system and it was a total game changer for me. The way a CGM works is that it tracks how your body responds to different foods. So I was able to see how different things correlated with what I was feeling in my body. So for instance I know if I eat sushi it always makes me feel really low energy but if I eat something with a lot of protein and a lot of fat

in it makes me feel really awake so I know what to eat at 2pm when I want a snack after a long day of meetings. Whenever I talk about this I get so many dms from you asking what my cgm is and how to get hold of one it's called levels and I actually just did an episode with the founder dr casey means and she let me ask her all the questions that I know you want to know the answers to I think you're going to find it really really fascinating so check that out it's episode 160 so the thing is levels is not available to the public yet but i was seriously so obsessed i begged them to first let me invest and second for them to give me a link for all of you and they finally did so i'm going to put that in the show notes and this link is actually going to get you in the back door so you can get your own cgm and start to figure out

how your body works on a metabolic level you'll be able to start seeing what you can do with the foods you eat to start feeling better and solving some of the reoccurring problems that you've been experiencing in your health. I think you're going to love it. So check that out. And then without further ado, let's dive in to the episode. Yeah, that's a really big one. And we've kind of faced the same thing. We didn't do it for a long time because we were so overwhelmed by the tech. And we were like, let's a really big one. And we've kind of faced the same thing. We didn't do it for a long

time because we were so overwhelmed by the tech and we were like, let's just start. Let's do it anyway. And we slowly scaled up to doing two episodes a week. But even now, there might be weeks where there's so much going on that we're like, you know what? One thing that isn't a priority is two episodes this week. If we get one episode out, that's good enough. When is good, good enough. And it's hard because a lot of us are perfectionists and you're like, oh, but I like the two episodes a week. But your business isn't going to fall apart if you don't do two episodes a week. But if you're still doing one a week, you're still staying consistent. When you start letting it slip completely, it's like working out when it slips completely,

it's a lot harder to get back in that rhythm and stay in consistent. Now, that's one of my favorite sections of this new book. So there's a chapter on pace. And we start with the practical thing and then we can build off of it if it's interesting. But the idea is to find yourself an effortless pace so that you can maintain your pace for a long period of time. Because what you don't want is intermittent progress. Intermittent progress, where you go big for a moment and then you do anything for ages, like you just said, fall off the wagon, is it doesn't add up to almost the same output. It's like it just produces very poor, mediocre results.

So what you want is to be consistent. Somebody just told me, actually, also from Newcastle, a podcaster, he was giving me some stat like within the first three episodes. Oh, I've got to find the actual number. It makes a difference. But after three episodes of a podcast, basically 90% of people stop. They never get further than that. And by 20 episodes, another 90% of the remaining 10% have also quit.

So just consistency alone increases significantly your chance of success with podcasting specifically. But of course, it's true for anything else as well. If you can keep going consistently, slow and up, slow and up to the right, it's just a bit more progress. If you can have any degree of progress consistently over a long period of time, you will have incredible results down the road. And so the way to do this, or one way to increase the chances of it, is to set not just a lower band of activity, a lower bound, excuse me. Like now that we're on the theme of podcasting, right? You're saying, okay, no less than one podcast a week. But then also have an upper bound where you say, okay more no less than one podcast a week but then also have an upper bound

where you say okay no more than two episodes a week like that's the max maybe there are some people that do three there are play you know examples of that but we're not gonna we're not even going to entertain that we're just going to you know no more than no more than two so you've got a range now and it's an acceptable range for you. And by doing that, you increase the chances of longevity greatly. And that's just podcasting, but you can apply it to anything. I started writing a journal years ago, and I really wanted to do this. And I'd done it many times intermittently. You do it for a while, then you drop off the wagon, do it for a while, and so on.

And I was like, I want to do it every day. So the rule I made, the lower bound was not less than one sentence a day. The upper bound was not more than five sentences a day. Because that meant that on a bad day, you've got no time. Okay, write the one sentence. On a good day when you're feeling all energetic and so you still limit it, you still go, this is still good. I want to be able to achieve this in a few minutes so that next, tomorrow, I'll still feel good about it and be able to carry on. And I don't think I've missed a day now in 10 years.

And it's just another illustration of the same idea. Whatever you're trying to do, have a lower bound, but also an upper bound so that you can make solid progress without burning out. That's one great strategy for how to break through to the next level, but without burning out. That's one great strategy for how to break through to the next level, but without burning out. I love that. And it really resonated, the idea of finding an effortless pace, something that you know you can stick to. And it's the exact same with Instagram. I cannot tell you how many times a day people message me on Instagram, even though I have so many videos and podcasts about it saying, how do I grow on Instagram? And they're all looking for this tip, this trick that's going to just transform it.

And the unsexy answer is consistency. It's, I've been doing it for a really long time and I still do it every single day, even when I don't feel like it. And I found that effortless pace for me. So I know I could show up and I think you can apply that to everything. What I think is often important with that, especially in work and especially with an entrepreneur is let's stay on the platform idea. If you're a podcaster or a YouTuber or Instagrammer, just picking one platform and finding your pace on that one platform versus like with that energy diagram we talked about versus trying to be on all the platforms doing really well at the same time i just think it just stretches you so thin and it's very difficult if you're not like a full-time content creator so i really really love that well let's talk about that for a second because i like to think of information-based products as their own business.

So not just separate products that need a different, have a different customer and be personalized to that group of your business. I like to think about, I like to push it beyond that and say, no, it's its own business. Like how many businesses do I want? And so if writing books, if that's a business, okay, that's business one. Okay, business two, I like to keynotes. That's its own separate business. Podcasting, okay, that's its own business and so on. It's a more sobering way

to think about it. And you stop just underestimating the costs of trying to do 10, 15 different businesses. And I think it's a good metaphor because I actually think it's pretty close to reality. Because if you have a podcast, if you have a YouTube channel, each of them, in fact, are a different audience because of who uses that platform. And for me, when I was saying like doing keynotes at conferences, well, the people who buy keynotes and conferences are not the same people who buy the book. And they aren't the same people who would buy coaching if I had a coaching business or workshops if I had a workshop business. Like I don't have a coaching business.

I don't have a workshop business. And that's because I think of them as separate businesses. And I think, yeah, I don't think I want to do that. I want to, whatever I do, I want to do really well. I want to do less but better, which I think is really the succinctest summary of essentialism. Oh, yeah. That's even making me consider, oh, wait, how many businesses do I have? Do I really need this many businesses? Probably so many. Yeah. Some people listening probably really resonated with that. So one thing that I want to talk to you about is I pulled one of the quotes out of your book. I

love that there's big quotes throughout the book. It's very Instagrammable with my morning coffee. Boss babes love that. Love it. And one of them is relaxing is a responsibility. Yes. So this is often one of those things that you read and you're like, yes, it absolutely is. And then you do it. And especially high performers end up thinking, well, this isn't really productive.

How is this helping me get to where I want to go? Whereas we know deep down that actually relaxing is a great thing to do for your health, for creativity, like it really does propel you forward. But shifting the mindset is really important. What would you say to that person who is listening and knows they should, but just has so much guilt around switching off and relaxing and slowing down? I would say that for many overachievers, they don't know how to relax. That's true. That's the real issue is that relaxing, as you say in the book, I write relaxing as a responsibility. But another thing to say about it is relaxing is a competence.

And what you have to, I think, accept is that as an overachiever, you're probably at level zero on the relaxing competence scale. You just don't know how. And so what that produces is a real level of discomfort because someone stops their work. They go, okay, put that aside. Put it aside my Instagram account. Put it aside my podcast. Put it aside all these different businesses. And then you go, okay, I've got to relax now.

But it's actually really uncomfortable and awkward. You don't know how to do it. And so then it's much easier to just jump back to work. I just checked the account again. Who has messaged me? I'll just get back onto email. I'll just do the business again. I'll just look on some graphics.

Or I'll just come up with tomorrow's post. It's much more comfortable to do that. But it's not ideal to do that because if you can develop this dual competency of working smart, but also relaxing smart, then it's like a slingshot that it actually propels you. You become more creative when it's like charging up the phone as it can work the next day. You are charged up. You're ready to go. Often the creative ideas will come in a state of relaxation, not in a time of execution. And so this slingshot value proposition is why it's worth developing the capability, the competency to relax. And one way that people can do this is to just like start paying attention and write a list,

you know, somewhere 10 items, maybe as many as 20 of like the things that you actually do enjoy doing for their own sake, that they just are rejuvenative to you. Some people like to drink tea sitting in bed reading a fictional book. Well, that's not me, but that's great. Know that about yourself. Write it down. Drinking tea in bed. I love doing that. Reading a fictional book.

I love doing that. Figure out the things that you love to do that actually relax you and just write the list. And then when you've got this list, let's say you've got to 20. Anna, my wife, and I each have a list of 20 now. It means that you can use them a bit like Lego building blocks where you say, okay, well, I've got the evening now. What do I want to do?

And you start to build rejuvenating rituals. You combine, mix, and match them to build something that you go, that is a nighttime ritual I really like. That's really good for me. I look forward to doing that rather than it just being blank space or I just put on the television because that's something I do and I spend hours doing it and it doesn't feel very satisfying. You actually build rituals that themselves rejuvenating so that they're joyful. And I think that's what you have to do is you go from level zero up the competency to become actually a skilled relaxer.

I think that just spoke to my soul. Yes, that is so true that it can be really difficult to know what it is that relaxes you. And I love the list thing because I remember my therapist having me do this. It was a few years ago when she was like, what do you do for fun? I'm like, well, you know, I like to design. She was like, no, anything that's not related to work, let's make a fun list. And just doing that was really helpful for me. And I'm really curious, what's on your relaxing list? What are some of the things? On my relaxing list, one of the things, and maybe it's first worldly, but I love to sit in the hot tub. We have it here. It's out under the California blue sky. We're in nature. I just love to be there.

And that might sound obvious, but until you write it on the list and then say, okay, that's a building block. How do I design a routine where I just do that every day and just make sure that that's part of the routine? I love to do it. It's good. It's a place I can talk without it, catch up. That's something that I love to do it. It's good. It's a place I can talk without it, catch up. You know, that's something that I love to do. I've already mentioned journaling. Some people that isn't going to work for, but I have very particular rituals

about the way I write my journal that I look forward to. It's good for my mental health. It's a good way to relax. I do have certain, you know, like a comedy, watching an episode of a comedy show different kinds it doesn't matter um you know maybe one episode of that that's something that relaxes me and i i think because

that i don't want to spend four hours watching tv no interest in that but if i if i watch half an hour of like like an episode of a show if i'm eating something that I like while I'm doing it, that's a very relaxing ritual for me. Swimming with my children, like actually going and swimming in the morning. I love doing that. That's a new ritual that we're doing that. I find that very relaxing, rejuvenating in and of itself. So those are playing tennis with my son,

not like a, I don't mean like a full hour or two, but like even just going even for 15 minutes between appointments, just the physicality of it, the just not being, you know, not the non-digitized nature of that. And then it's with him and he's fun to play with it. He's fun to be around. That's relaxing. So these are some of the examples that would be on my list. Yeah, those are great.

And I relate to the tennis one. I have recently started playing pickleball and I love it. And what's great is I cannot be thinking about anything else but pickleball while I'm playing. You really have to be paying attention. Same with tennis. And you're out, you're in nature, you're getting fresh air. And so I was doing that on a Sunday. I loved it. And so I started to bring it into my week and it's such a good way to change up energy.

So I'm definitely going to go away and make a list of 20 things because I need to do more of that. So I have another question for you and you kind of touched on this earlier. It was something you still get dragged into, but I know that one thing that I struggle with is, you know, always feeling like I need to be on top of my emails, my Slack, my DMs, my texts, getting back to people. How can one start to get better at that, to not feel like they have to answer everything, not have guilt around answering everything, and not let other people's priorities really dictate how their time is spent? I think the first thing you want to do about this is to get clear on your yes. I do believe in saying no. I do think that's really important. You're not empowered if you can't say no. But I didn't write a book called Noism, you know, say no to everyone and everything all the time. That's not the key. The key is essentialism. It's in the title. It's what is essential? What is your clear yes? So what I would say is the best antidote to

this, the feeling you're describing, the FOMO, the guilt, the shame of it, the addiction to it, like all of that, the best solution is to know what the big yes is. Because then you have something to compare it to when you say, okay, am I going to respond to all this email right now or am I going to get this big yes done? You say, well, that's the proper trade-off. Well, no, I'm not going to do these things. Because of this, you have a reason not to do the other stuff because you've got a clear yes. And so one of the things I would just suggest is that every day you answer that question. Put up a little note for yourself on your screensaver or right by your computer or whatever. What's the most important thing I need to do today?

Some days you can answer that question easily. It will be clear. Some days you won't. You'll have to wrestle with it a bit. But I have somebody from the UK who I had on the podcast And she started asking this question every day. And at first, it was just to do with ideas with a business. She runs a consultancy. Then it became more self-care items. I'm just not exercising well enough. I'm not eating well enough. And so these became her answers. And then one day, she gets a call from her dad and he says, listen, mom's in the hospital right now.

It's nothing serious. I just want to let you know, please don't worry yourself about it. You've got way too much to do. And she said when she asked the question that day, what's the most important thing I need to do today? It was just so clear that she needed to stop what she was doing, drive two hours to the hospital to see her mother. And when she got there, she's chatting with her mom and she just says, look, mom, I love you. I just want you to know that. That's why I'm here. And the mother says, I love you too. And everything just seems fair enough. Within an hour of that conversation, she fell into a coma unexpectedly

and never recovered from that. A week later, they had the unfortunate job of turning off the life support machine. And she just wrote to me. That's how I got to know her. She wrote to me and she said, if I hadn't been an essentialist, if I hadn't been asking that question every day, I would have made a different decision. I would have asked, oh, how do I just get more done today? And then she would have spent her life doing that. What's the most important thing today? Gave her a different answer, a clear answer, and ended up making all the difference in this very personal way. So I think that's the fastest, best antidote to put that on my desk and ask

myself that throughout the day and make sure that I am moving the needle on something. And you mentioned having that added into your routine. Do you do anything else in say your morning routine or what is your routine that sets you up for success in an essential kind of way or while you're prioritizing things, you're simplifying things. What does that look like for you? I used to do personal quarterly off-sites and I still think that I recommend that to people to take some time every 90 days to get clear, okay, what's the priority over the next 90 days? Priority, singular. The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s and was singular.

It was the prioress thing, the one thing. And it stayed singular, according to Peter Drucker, for the next 500 years. And only then did someone start pluralizing the term. But what does it even mean? What does, can you have very, very many, very first before all other things, things, uh, it's sort of ludicrous. And, and, and yet sometimes we go about our lives as if, yeah, here are my 35 priorities and they all

have to be done now. And so, so what, what I do to try and manage that is I've moved to doing it every six months. And I'll take two days every six months to really evaluate the last six months to really look at it all. And then say, okay, what do I really feel inspired to do next? What are, and I don't mean this one thing. There's a list of things that I'm feeling like this is next. These are the next things that I would like to do over the next six months. But out of that, I'm prioritizing it so that I can identify if there's only one thing

that you get done in the next six months, this is it. And so I find that process of going big picture every six months a very helpful – I do it in the spring, so the end of the first quarter and then at the end of the third quarter. And I do it – I mean, to be honest, I do it as part of – church has a big global world conference every six months. And so I just design it around that so that I'm getting all this inspiration, all these great talks and speeches and inputs. And it's such a great way to be evaluating my life with something additional, some, you know, like the best thinking and the best insights. And so I feel inspiration that comes from that and even revelation

to help guide my life over that next six months. So I would say that's a practice. It's not a daily practice, which maybe you were looking for, but that is a practice that I found to be, how should I say, like game-changing since I started doing it. And when you're looking at priorities, do you assess personal priorities as well as business ones and kind of pick one thing for each? Or do you just have one main thing? I definitely think that you can, even though I suppose it feels like a bit of a cheat,

but I definitely think it helps to have one in the business and one in the personal. And to make a consistent point here, for me, the family is more important than the professional. So I still do know what, if there's only one thing that's going to be on the family side, that's what matters. That's what's going to matter in the end. Because that's what matters most now as well. It's just sometimes in the busyness of life, we forget that. And so I tend to have, I'll know at any given time what's the most important thing I need to do on the family side and then also on the professional side. So that's how I think about that. I love that. I have so many takeaways from this episode.

I've been writing notes frantically, and I know that everyone listening is going to be feeling the same. So if you felt the same, make sure you share this podcast and tag us with your biggest takeaway. Greg, where can everyone find you? Where can they purchase your new book? Give us all the things. Well, as an essentialist, I'm just going to give one.

I just think, you know, just if people go and listen and subscribe to the What's Essential podcast, that's sort of the place that these conversations happen. And from there, they'll learn about, you know, all the other new things that are coming and all the, they get to hear conversations with everyday people who are trying to make it what's essential as effortless as possible. That's the whole gig. And so that's what I think I would encourage people to do.

Amazing. I will definitely go and subscribe right after this. Thank you so much for your time. Natalie, it's been fantastic. Thank you.