Minimalism - Focus Your Time

I started a series of posts related to minimalism in 2019 but paused my blog shortly after. This is a continuation of that series.

When minimalists talk about focusing time, they don’t mean keeping attention on the activity at hand. That’s important, but their point is to use time in a more purposeful way. Overcommitting at work and home leads to stress, frustration, and disappointment. It affects self-esteem when we mislabel the reason for our lack of progress, believing we’ve failed through a lack of effort as opposed to understanding that we’ve over budgeted our time. Hard work matters, but it cannot overcome the time costs of what we do, and everything has a minimum cost. Minimalists suggest that, because time is limited, you should focus on doing what is most meaningful to you.¹

Focusing time has historically been difficult for me:

• As good as I can be at planning, I can be equally poor at estimating how long something will take. The result is an overfilled schedule.
• I want to do everything, so picking a single thing can leave me feeling disappointed that I didn’t get to do more, especially with hobby or leisure activities. I should be thankful for what I did do instead of regretful for what I didn’t.

Solving the first point hasn’t been easy, but there are blueprints. The simplest is to limit the number of items on the day’s to-do list without specifically estimating the time each one will take. That could mean setting a cap of five small tasks or one big one per day. Limiting the number of tasks performed each day works well if you’re already good at prioritizing, and it allows flexibility regarding when those tasks will be completed. Time blocking is another approach, where each day has periods of time allocated to particular types of tasks. Larger tasks might be your 8:00-10:00 AM “appointment,” and easy ones could be done from 1:00-3:00 PM. Time blocking can be effective because it doesn’t stipulate what will get done that day, but rather how much time will be allotted to do the tasks. There are many other time management approaches², but I’ve been most successful by limiting my daily tasks and doing some basic time blocking³.

The second point is more problematic because it’s a psychological response, yet I think it’s the most important part of this concept. Each day is a fresh start, but when it ends so do the possibilities that existed in the morning. If I chose to read a book in the evening, then I felt I “lost out” on the opportunity to work on my photography or play a video game. I am not unique in that regard. Everyone deals with mutually exclusive choices, but what I did recognize is that the list of things I wanted to do was unrealistically large. Focusing helped me pare back the list to a few strong interests and projects, and I gave myself permission to “nap” the others.⁴ That change in perspective gave me an opportunity to schedule the things I really enjoyed—so I could do all of them during a week, if I wanted—and to stop fretting over the other things that I identified as not currently important to me.

I wondered why I needed to go through the focusing process in order to recognize that I wanted to do too much. Shouldn’t it have been obvious? I think that, like so many things in our lives, I reached the saturation point gradually over time. I added more and more things to my list of interests over the course of several years, and it wasn’t until I paused to consider the scope of my interests that I realized just how massive the list had become. It’s kind of like weight gain. We gain weight over time through imperceptible daily changes until one day our clothes don’t fit. (In essence, I put my overweight interest list on a diet.) We are also conditioned to believe that the more we get done the “better” we are as a person (or an employee). There is value in a developing a good work ethic. There is burn out in becoming a workaholic.

The focus aspect of minimalism presents the biggest challenge to me. I’m naturally curious, so I have to be cognizant of what that curiosity costs in terms of time (and focus at the task level). I haven’t fully accepted the limits of how much I can comfortably do in a day, so I’ll still over schedule. But I’m learning when to pocket the objects of my curiosity for another time, and how to resist adding another thing to juggle when there’s already enough balls in the air. It’s amazing how freeing that can be.