"What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance?
What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?"
When we say "Yes" every time someone asks, we can end up so busy with trivial projects that we don't have time for what is important, or essential. How do we decide what's essential when we seem to have thousands of options? In his book, Essentialism, Greg McKeown explains how to determine which tasks are important.
"Only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter."
Shouldn't that be our ultimate goal - to live a life of purpose, and make contributions towards the things that matter? Rather than spreading ourselves thin and making small progress on many things, consider instead doing the opposite - getting focused and making large progress on one thing: your Essential Intent.
“An essential intent...is both inspirational and concrete, both meaningful and measurable. Done right, an essential intent is one decision that settles one thousand later decisions.”
What does that mean for you? Essentialism can be a great help in not only discerning what your Essential Intent is, but also what steps to take once you've figured it out.
When we say "yes" to too many requests, instead of sometimes saying, "no", we create more harm than help.
If you've found yourself in the same situation - stretched too thin, trying to be everything to everyone, read this book and learn to say "NO!" because as McKeown says: