COVID-19 social norms and government restrictions have essentially forced us all to simplify our lives overnight. Aside from remote work (for the lucky ones still employed) and school, literally everything has been cancelled. Here in Wisconsin, we are about four weeks into the COVID-19 quarantine with no end in sight. No more swim lessons, doctor’s appointments, girl scouts, in-person piano lessons, play dates, driving to work, or dinner parties. I’ve spent nearly my entire adult life trying to simplify my life and, suddenly, it is incredibly simple. Now may be the perfect time to take stock of our lives and then simplify life for good.
Now is the perfect time to evaluate what we’re doing with our lives and remove the activities or things that don’t bring us joy or help us reach our life goals.
The Simplification Series
So, I’m going to share some of the most effective ways I’ve found to simplify my life. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing a roadmap of sorts for simplifying your life for good. I have tried each of these techniques myself and spoken with or coached many others through them. Put together, they are a powerful force for helping us build the life we want.
Why Now?
Now, during the COVID-19 quarantine, is the perfect time to start. One of the hardest parts of simplifying life is to eliminate the things that don’t move the needle for you. Busy is not the same as productive. Time is our most valuable resource. Right now, we’ve been given a gift. We’ve had most of our obligations eliminated for us so we can see what life is like without them. In a few weeks, we’ll have the chance to start them up again. Now is the perfect time to evaluate what we’re doing with our lives and remove the activities or things that don’t bring us joy or help us reach our life goals.
Time is our most valuable resource.
The Simplification Roadmap to Simplify Life for Good
Over the next few weeks, we will cover the following important topics.
- Setting Goals & Understanding Priorities
- Simplifying Your Schedule & How to Focus on the Right Things to Do
- Simplifying Your Stuff
- Maintaining a Simpler Life
Getting Started
The next post will focus on setting goals and figuring out what’s most important to you. If you want to get a jump-start on it, here are two resources that I have found most helpful to get you started:
- Living Forward: A Proven Plan to Stop Drifting and Get the Life you Want by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy – For those who want to think through what’s really important to them and come up with a plan of action, there is no better roadmap. It takes a while to go through the process, but it is worth it.
- Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) – A way of writing goals, introduced by Peter Drucker in 1954, used by Andy Grove at Intel and made famous by John Doerr and Google, that forces you to think about not just your goals, but specific, measurable results. I talk about them in these keynote slides from Business Agility Midwest 2019. John Doerr has a great TED Talk and book called Measure What Matters. This Medium article by niket does a good job of explaining them too.
Just like all of you, I’m juggling full-time work from home and homeschooling too. Writing brings me a little slice of sanity, so thanks for reading!
