7 Things You Must Do to Become a Minimalist & Get More Out of Life
“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”
— Picasso
My family and friends often harass me (lovingly) for being what they call “cheap.” However, I think their label is inaccurate.
I’m not cheap, I’m a minimalist.
By that I mean that I don’t believe the way to success, happiness, and fulfillment is through maximizing my income, consumption, and entertainment, but through minimizing the chaos and distractions in my life, allowing me to focus on what’s most important.
I’m not writing this because I think I’ve mastered the principles that follow. I am writing this to more fully commit myself to them. I am undoubtedly talking to myself whenever I say “you” throughout this post.
Consider these 7 ways to simplify your life, and become more productive.
1. Minimize the amount of decisions you make in a given day
Traditional economics tells us that consumers love having options. The more options the better, economists often say.
Of course, being able to decide between a wide variety of goods and services is good in general, but behavioral economics and psychology have taught us that making decisions is exhausting for us as humans. Forced to make various choices in a row we actually become less intelligent and more careless. This is often referred to as decision fatigue.
A particularly interesting example of decision fatigue involved a parole board and a judge responsible for making decisions about whether a prisoner deserved parole. The group would see many different parole cases throughout the day. According to the New York Times, “Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.” As a prisoner, you had about a 60% greater chance of being paroled if your case was reviewed at 8:50 a.m. rather than, say, 4:30 p.m.
What this tells us is that decision fatigue doesn’t just affect the small, insignificant decisions, but also the very important decisions. The board was making decisions that would affect the prisoner’s lives in a massive way, and, inevitably, they must have denied many prisoner’s who actually merited parole.
But, do we really make enough decisions per day for decision fatigue to affect us? According to two economists at Cornell, Wansink and Sobal, the average person makes 226.7 decisions each day just on food alone.
-That’s a lot of decision fatigue to incur for a couple of cheese burgers.
Steve Jobs was a master of this principle. He was known for his uniform: black turtle neck, blue jeans, and New Balance sneakers
Why did the Apple founder wear the same boring clothes everyday? Because he understood that his brain could process a finite amount of decisions in a given day. He was not going to waste that brain power choosing what to wear when he needed to make crucial decisions about how to run the most valuable company in the world.
A powerful way to eliminate decisions is by having a strict morning routine. A lot of our decision-making fatigue happens in the first few hours of the day. Should you get out of bed or hit snooze? What should you have for breakfast? Should you exercise or read a good book? How much time should you allocate to each of these activities? What project should you focus on?
A strict morning routine can eliminate a lot of your daily decision fatigue, and help you get more done.
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A strict mourning routine might look something like this:
5:30 a.m. — wake up
5:30 to 6:15 — exercise
6:15 to 6:30 — shower and get dressed
6:30 to 6:45 — eat breakfast
by 7:00 a.m. — start working on your most important project
You just eliminated several decisions simply by having a strict morning routine. Make sure you define your most important project the night before. This will ensure that you don’t waste time and decision-making power in the morning trying to decide what to work on. On top of all this, avoid checking your email in the morning.
Eliminate unnecessary decisions.
2. Minimize your expenditures
This one may seem obvious, but you would be amazed how much peace of mind can be gained just by having more financial self-control.
As Americans we suck at this principle. Our personal savings rate usually hovers around 3–5% of our income, whereas, China’s personal savings rate is between 25–50% of their income.
We make financial decisions based on what behavioral economists call mental accounting. In other words, we put our money into various “buckets.” For example, say you created a strict budget at the beginning of the month. You budgeted for various categories including, food, transportation, and clothing.
Originally, you had budgeted 100 dollars for food. It is now the last week of the month and you have only spent 50 of the allotted 100 dollars. The most rational thing to do would be to put the excess 50 dollars away in your savings account.
However, various studies have shown that this is not the way we behave. Instead we think, “Hey, I’ve only used half of my food money. I can treat myself to two expensive restaurants this week!”
Having a budget is a great idea, but make it a rule of thumb for yourself that any left over funds from a given category of your budget, at the end of the month, go directly to savings.
Put your money only toward stuff that adds to your long-term progress, joy, and fulfillment.
3. Minimize your debt
Household debt in the U.S. is at its highest level since 2010. The following image shows a breakdown of the different types of debt we hold as Americans. Of course, some of this debt is necessary, and positively affects our long run economic outlook. Student loans and mortgages can be great investments. What is particularly worrisome, however, is credit card debt.
Why has debt grown so fast? According to Nerd Wallet, “The rise in the cost of living has outpaced income growth over the past 12 years.”
Nerd Wallet also claims that:
“Consumers vastly underestimate or underreport how much debt they have. In fact, as of 2013, actual lender-reported credit card debt was 155% greater than borrower-reported balances.”
Of all Nerd Wallet’s claims about debt, this one may be the most shocking:
“The average household is paying a total of $6,658 in interest per year. This is 9% of the average household income ($75,591) being spent on interest alone.”
Few things can provide you with more stress, and less sleep, than debt. If you already find yourself in a fair amount of debt, look into Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps.
Here is Baby Step #2:
“List all debts but the house in order. The smallest balance should be your number one priority. Don’t worry about interest rates unless two debts have similar payoffs. If that’s the case, then list the higher interest rate debt first.”
Kill your debt.
4. Minimize the stuff you own
Take a quick break from reading to go look in your garage, or closet (if you’re like me and don’t own a garage). When was the last time you actually used some of the items you see?
For whatever reason, we are very subject to loss aversion as humans. Loss aversion is a term coined by behavioral economists and psychologists which means we prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are about twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.
Professional golfers are even subject to loss aversion. According to a study by economists Devin G. Pope and Maurice E. Schweitzer, the best golfers on the PGA Tour leave $1.2 million in earnings on the table each year. Their work shows that golfers make their birdie putts 2–3 percentage points less often than they make their par putts. This is because a birdie is viewed as a gain, but missing a par putt is viewed as a loss.
You may not lose $1.2 million dollars this year because of loss aversion, but golfers aren’t the only people subject to this problem.
Consider this simple example: You buy a large, and rather expensive, piece of workout equipment for your home (After all, it is a new year). You set a goal to use the workout equipment three times per week. At the end of the year you are packing up your belongings to move across town. You’ve only used the equipment a handful of times, and it spends most of its time collecting dust in the basement. Do you move the machine with you to your new home?
Studies suggest that you probably will move the machine with you, because you can’t handle the thought of having lost the money you paid to buy it at the beginning of the year.
But wouldn’t you be much better off if you gave it away? Or even threw it away?
Get rid of your crap.
5. Minimize your schedule
Having an insane schedule is worn as a badge in our society. We get some sort of sick serotonin effect out of saying, “I’m too busy.” We often turn down opportunities to help people in need, or do something we truly love just so we can say, “I’m too busy.”
“Focus on being productive instead of busy.” — Tim Ferriss
Here are some ways to minimize your schedule:
- Reduce your work hours. Read this.
- Work from home. Read this.
- Have set email and social media times (Never mornings). Read this.
- Focus only on the most important projects. Read this.
- Outsource the unimportant when possible. Read this.
- Learn to say “no” occasionally. Read this.
- Shut off the computer and phone. Read this.
- Change jobs. Read this.
Instead of slaving away in a job you hate, do what you love and are passionate about. If you just so happen to be passionate about investment banking….well….I’m sorry.
Work toward something you’re passionate about.
6. Minimize your goals
Every new year you feel forced to create resolutions. You know the drill, You create a long list of goals for the year, and by February you’ve forgotten 90% of them.
Instead of thinking in terms of resolutions, think in terms of what you will become this year.
For example, “by the end of 2016 I will become a master guitarist.” Remembering this vision for what you want to become will keep you much more focused than a long list of goals.
Of course, setting a couple of simple goals based on your vision is helpful and important, but keep the list narrowed to only the two or three most important actionable metrics.
Create a vision for your life.
7. Minimize your multitasking
The idea of multitasking is largely a myth. Recent neuroscience studies show that the brain doesn’t do tasks simultaneously, like we thought in the past. We actually just switch tasks quickly.
Here are some important points from Psychology Today:
- It takes more time to get tasks completed if you switch between them than if you do them one at a time.
- You make more errors when you switch than if you do one task at a time.
- If the tasks are complex then these time and error penalties increase.
- Each task switch might waste only 1/10th of a second, but if you do a lot of switching in a day it can add up to a loss of 40% of your productivity.
- Task switching involves several parts of your brain: Brain scans during task switching show activity in four major areas: the pre-frontal cortex is involved in shifting and focusing your attention, and selecting which task to do when. The posterior parietal lobe activates rules for each task you switch to, the anterior cingulate gyrus monitors errors, and the pre-motor cortex is preparing for you to move in some way.
Multitasking won’t help you to be more productive in the long run. Focus on one task at a time, starting with the most important.
Stop doing everything at once.
Conclusion
Most people think that more and bigger is better, but the truth is actually that less is more. If more and bigger were better, Gandhi and Mother Teresa wouldn’t be symbols of wisdom for our society. If more and bigger were better, countless wealthy celebrities wouldn’t be depressed or suicidal. If more and bigger were better, David would’ve lost.
If you want to become and do more, simplify.
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Thanks for reading!
