Any talk about simplicity or minimalism can’t get away from the time dimension, because that’s the dimension that really counts.
More than having open space in your living room, it’s having open time in your calendar, in your life, time to do the things that you really want to do, rather than having time be filled up with various things that are kind of forcing themselves into your schedule.
So I like looking at this time dimension the same way that a minimalist might look at a living room, and you can think, well, what’s all this clutter doing here?
Why do I need all this stuff?
So minimalist time management.
Bringing everything down to the basics.
There’s a lot of different strategies for how to get more done, how to be more efficient with time, but we still have this very restrictive dimension.
We still have the same number of hours.
There’s still so many more things that we can do that we could ever actually do within the time available, our 10 to 20,000 days, our couple hundred thousand hours that we have, and that’s it.
So along with all the other things you could say about becoming more efficient, increasing your leverage by outsourcing, and all this kind of stuff, nothing replaces the most simple thing of all, which is to simply not do the thing.
Just don’t do it.
You don’t need to do it.
Why are you doing it?
Why do you need to do this thing?
To be able to reduce that to-do list down and simply cross items off.
I’ve been struggling with this for years and gradually removing certain things.
And just like with throwing out a possession that has some kind of sentimental value, simply saying that “Yeah, I’m simply not going to do this in my life.
This is not going to be a part of my life.
I will not achieve this particular goal.
I will not complete this particular project.”
And simply being OK with removing it from the list: that is not an easy cut to make.
But I find when I do that, I suddenly have this feeling of spaciousness, this feeling of openness, just like as if I had thrown out a bunch of clutter from my living room.
So as part of this, I find the central thing that I come back to is this idea that I don’t need to do anything.
I simply don’t need to.
Instead of feeling that I’m always moving from one task to the next task, I get this done and this done, cross this off the list, cross this off the list: that can have its moments too.
But it’s easy for the day to go by just completing a bunch of tasks that maybe don’t really add up to what I’m looking for.
And sometimes, if I go on in this kind of robotic fashion for too long, it just starts to feel pointless, like why am I even completing these tasks?
So I like to be able to just completely stop and say OK, I don’t need to do anything.
And then just go to a quiet place.
I like to just sit in the living room here, maybe often look out that east-facing window there, just look out the window, have complete nothingness, complete nothing to do, and just allow that to be.
Just allow myself to do nothing.
I can go for a walk, go to the park.
As if just not a care in the world.
And it is a feeling of great luxury to be able to even have that time.
But it’s simply from being able to not feel forced to do another task.
I simply don’t need to do it.
To allow myself to do nothing.
And then in that state, I find that something will occur to me.
Oh, I could do this to improve my situation.
Here’s something that would actually make my life better.
Something comes to mind, and then I can do that thing.
And when I’ve done that thing, go right back to that state of doing nothing.
so having empty time as being the default.
Default to doing nothing, and then only do things as I feel called to do them, as the time feels right, and I can feel in that moment that this will improve my life.
Rather than simply robotically going through a to-do list of things that I felt at some point I should do, that I eventually just even forget how they’re going to improve my life, I just feel I should do them.
Instead go back to that simple state of nothingness, and start again from there.
So I enjoy this feeling.
I’m curious to hear what you think of this method of time management.
Or is it just going to result in being really lazy and doing nothing?
And is there another approach we can have to minimalist time management?
#donothing #minimalisttime #nothingtodo