F*ck Essentialism
Or why being an essentialist is simply not effective in the modern world
I just recently finished reading Greg McKeown’s book “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less”. I somehow liked key ideas and definitely, there are people in this world who would be happy to adopt these ideas and bring them to life, however as for me I’d simply die being an essentialist. This is not only boring but also leads you to nowhere. Being a complete non-essentialist, I only made sure I love my personal approach of “management over the chaos” and enjoy working on 100500 projects at once. And here is a list of tips on how to be effective not being an essentialist.
Essentialism: What and for Who
Essentialism is a lifestyle philosophy of being focused on one thing only. The idea of Occam’s razor works here like it was just made for essentialism. So, what this is about:
- having 1 job;
- being effective because you have 1 goal, 1 vector and 1 focus;
- being concentrated having only 1 key task and cutting off anything else considering it odd.
Essentialism would suit people who are focused, attentive and keener to the work that requires high concentration. However, for me, a manager, being an essentialist is not effective. Essentialists will never insert a new task into the list of daily tasks since it was not planned. Essentialists would never open a second business or startup since it will drive focus away and vanish worktime. Essentialists will never do several things at a time or have more than 5 tasks during the day (I have around 60 and I’m fine with it).
They say having a small number of tasks can drive you crazy, make you irritated and lead to poor quality of work on all tasks. However, I’d say that only people with natural disabilities are multi-task workers and people who don’t like “being everywhere” would agree with it. For me, essentialism is a road to stagnation.
NON-Essentialism
Instead, being non-essentialist means:
- having multiple businesses;
- at the same time doing an academic career and having private life;
- having lots of different hobbies like a blog, NFT collection and podcast;
- working every day paying attention to all multiple things following an exact timeline.
Managing all of this would not be complicated if you just:
- make a good day schedule with exact timing;
- learn to choose yourself over anything and just move tasks you don’t want to work on now;
- understand the truly important and value (for example NFT may be needed for the modern development and blog for networking and personal brand);
- develop all projects and cut off those you got bored with and those that no longer seem interesting to people.
Being a non-essentialist means doing 100 things at once, working on everything and being in the great middle of the universe every second of your life. It is pleasant chaos, you can always control it with an effective daily agenda.
Being an essentialist seems like trying to avoid the normal life of XXI century people and reality. Hiding at 1 job and 1 hobby, blocking your potential and choices will definitely lead you to the Fear of Missing Out and will not be that cool, as simply being tired of being highly productive during the day.
