Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilized? Are you often busy but not productive? Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas? If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist. The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.

By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy - instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us. Essentialism is not one more thing - it’s a whole new way of doing everything. It’s about doing less, but better, in every area of our lives. Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.

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Listening Length	6 hours and 14 minutes
Author	Greg McKeown
Narrator	Greg McKeown
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	April 15, 2014
Publisher	Random House Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B00IWYP5NI
Best Sellers Rank	#359 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #3 in Time Management (Books) #4 in Business Decision Making & Problem Solving #7 in Business Decision Making

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Top reviews from the United States

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Dualsportvet

Great for the CEOs, CFOs, and people that don't have to answer to others.

Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2017

Verified Purchase

Just another self-help book written by an exec that has the ability to say "no I'm not going to do that." Try doing that as a low level manager, or better yet an employee. As a manager, I had to read this. It was painful. As a manager, if you can't multi task you're out of a job. Instead of trying to tell people how to focus on the one thing, it should be how to focus on the most important while giving time to the rest. At the end of the book he even says most essentialists aren't and non-essentialists are essentialists. Making the point that it's all BS anyways. Living as a "essentialist" is fairy tail. It can't happen, well not unless you own your own company or you're a stay at home mom/dad and the other adult doesn't care what you do. (edited for phones auto-correct)

381 people found this helpful

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Destiny Yarbro

I read this 1-2 times every year to keep my balance.

Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2017

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My title sounds like I'm lying - who would read a book that many times? But honestly, this has become my go-to book whenever I feel overwhelmed with life. It helps me simplify - but so much more than just that. It helps me analyze my current projects and focus on the 2-3 that will 1) help the most people, 2) have the greatest impact, and 3) be the kind of work I want to be known for. I just published my own book tonight and then I decided to pay it forward by reviewing the books that have helped me focus and get this book done after 3.5 years. Two weeks ago I went to read Essentialism again (I was feeling overwhelmed with publishing stress) and then realized I have already read it twice this year. :) What can I say, it's become a staple book in my reading diet.

166 people found this helpful

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Ahmad Moshrif

You need it, trust me!

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2014

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For sure, this is one of the best books i've read recently. And it deserve the 5 starts, here is some key takeaways:

"If you have a big presentation coming up over the next few weeks or months, open a file right now and spend four minutes starting to put down any ideas. Then close the file. No more than four minutes. Just start it."

" MIX UP YOUR ROUTINES It’s true that doing the same things at the same time, day after day, can get boring. To avoid this kind of routine fatigue, there’s no reason why you can’t have different routines for different days of the week. Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter and founder of Square, has an interesting approach to his weekly routine. He has divided up his week into themes. Monday is for management meetings and “running the company” work. Tuesday is for product development. Wednesday is for marketing, communications, and growth. Thursday is for developers and partnerships. Friday is for the company and its culture.9 This routine helps to provide calmness amid the chaos of a high-growth start-up. It enables him to focus his energy on a single theme each day instead of feeling pulled into everything. He adheres to this routine each week, no exceptions, and over time people learn this about him and can organize meetings and requests around it."

“In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.”

“Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.”

"The Prophet Muhammad lived an essential life that included mending his own shoes and clothes and milking his own goat and taught his followers in Islam to do the same."

Henry David Thoreau (who wrote, “I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; … so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real”).

"While other people are padding their résumés and building out their LinkedIn profiles, you will be building a career of meaning."

"The life of an Essentialist is a life lived without regret. If you have correctly identified what really matters, if you invest your time and energy in it, then it is difficult to regret the choices you make. You become proud of the life you have chosen to live."

"If you take one thing away from this book, I hope you will remember this: whatever decision or challenge or crossroads you face in your life, simply ask yourself, “What is essential?” Eliminate everything else."

292 people found this helpful

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MoseyOn

Less Is More. It's Also Less. That's the Point.

Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2018

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I enjoyed this book and found some very useful insights in McKeown’s argument, which boiled down to its essence is this: Rather than trying to cram more and more into our lives, and thinking that by doing so we are achieving something, we would be better off doing less, but doing it better. For this to work, there are two crucial words that need to be defined. The first is success, or perhaps achievement. While McKeown does not precisely define this slippery and highly subjective term, it is clear that it doesn’t mean making a lot of money. It has more to do with life satisfaction, meaning, and value. Of course, pursuing these objectives does not preclude making a lot of money, but success should be measured in other ways. The second word needing careful definition is less. By this, McKeown does not mean simply doing fewer things in order to free up calendar space, but doing only the right things. The whole point of Essentialism, both the book and what McKeown calls the “movement” (whether or not that term is really accurate), is to identify the very most important things, i.e., those activities that are essential. Focus on them, and eliminate everything else. Easier said than done, yes, but you’ll never do it if you don’t first decide that it is desirable. Or essential.

What this really involves, then, is defining values as you set priorities, because as we all know, if you don’t decide what is the most important use of your time, someone else will. You will end up spending your time—your least renewable resource—pursuing someone else’s agenda rather than your own. Whose success, happiness, fulfillment, and goals are you then working toward? Probably not your own. A lot of McKeown’s advice is simply logical common sense. The fact that in the course of reading the book you so often say “yeah, that makes sense, I should do that,” is probably not an indication that this is all new so much as a reminder that it’s not necessarily easy to take real control of your life. McKeown advises that everyone regularly ask this question: “What is the most important thing for me to do right now?” How often can any of us honestly answer, “Exactly what I’m doing”?

44 people found this helpful

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W Yang

Good sensible ideas - but would you CHOOSE to put them to practice?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 15, 2015

Verified Purchase

Single most memorable passage:
"Charlie O. Simms taught a Journalism 101 class at Beverly Hills High School. He started... by explaining the concept of a "lead". He explained that a lead contains the why, what , when, and who of the piece. It covers the ESSENTIAL(my emphasis) information. Then he gave them their first assignment: write a lead to a story.
Simms began by presenting the facts of the story: "Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund 'Pa' Brown"
The students hammered away on their manual typewriters trying to keep up with the teacher's peace. Then they handed in their rapidly written leads. Each attempted to summarise the who, what where, and why as succinctly as possible: "Margaret Mead, Maynard Hutchins, and Governor Brown will address the faculty on ..."; "Next Thursday, the high school faculty will ..." Simms reviewed the students' leads and put them aside.
He then informed them that they were all wrong. The lead to the story, he said, was "There will be no school on Thursday."
"In that instant," Nora Ephron(of [Sleepless in Seattle] and [When Harry met Sally]) recalled, "I realised that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the POINT. It wasn't enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it MEANT. And why it MATTERED." Ephron added, "He taught me something that works just as well in life as it does in journalism." " p73-74

Disclaimer - I have not read a whole lot of management/self-improvement books, so I cannot say that I am a very good judge of the genre. There is a danger that this book is actually littered with tired old cliches that I hadn't noticed, in which case I shouldn't have bothered you with this. That said -

Self-improvement books are a strange breed - myself included, you so often see people who read one and then complain that the book only wrote about the really obvious things. In the same sense, however, homo sapiens are a strange breed who never quite do what they know to be the obviously good things for themselves. grin emoticon Enter, then, the study of management - the study on "coordination of the efforts of people to accomplish goals and objectives by using available resources efficiently and effectively". Sounds like self-improvement on a larger scale, but with the added benefit of providing results from well-designed research.

The author is a management consultant with an MBA degree from Stanford. Perhaps naturally, the book often reads like a business strategy book with plenty of case studies from the corporate world, but as Ephron says, those methods can easily be used for life in general. The book's message can be neatly summed up in one sentence - "Figure out what is really important and essential in your life, and eliminate everything else to focus your efforts and achieve maximum output/contribution to society". The rest of the book is just filled up by how to achieve that goal.

While 'the rest of the book' is coherently structured with a logical, well-suited flow and sensible, well-researched suggestions backed up by sociology/psychology research findings(these days it seems impossible to read something that doesn't quote [Flow] by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and [Thinking Fast and Slow] by Daniel Kahneman, although probably due to my reading interests. Perhaps I should just give up and add them to the reading list), some solutions that the author suggests will just sound implausible. One example is the importance of being able to say no to your boss so that you can concentrate on something more essential. Obviously, I cannot imagine myself doing so to my bosses, consultant surgeons. For some other solutions, I thought they can only be done when one is reasonably financially secure, so that he/she can take the risk/hit by cutting out/declining all the non-essential activities that regularly plague our lives. However, (as my stock-phrase goes) if we are to look at the moon instead of the finger pointing at the moon...

The part that really inspires me in this book is its single-minded pursuit and the determination for what constitutes the most important thing in our lives; what makes our lives meaningful for us(as illustrated in the above anecdote), and what will ultimately enable us to be useful to the rest of the humanity. Sure, it may not always be obvious to all of us, and the method of elimination the book suggests may not guarantee to lead us to an answer. In fact, our lives may quite possibly be meaningless! :-D Nevertheless, for me it is certainly worth a try.

The other aspects that left a strong impression for me was the authors repeated emphasis on how pursuing Essentialism is a choice, and the importance of EMOTIONAL(not intellectual) acceptance of the book's ideas for them to work - which is to say, as discussed at the beginning, it is not because we don't know what to do why we don't do them. There is always a choice, and we simply choose not to.

105 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

A long blog post

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 1, 2019

Verified Purchase

Some nice ideas in this book but not very well written and most of them are just not practical unless you have the money to skip off the south of France for 6 months. Also using Rosa Parks & Gandhi as examples feels a bit crass especially when you put them next to another examples in the book like saying no because they had to plan a wedding. All the ideas in the book could easily fit into a shot blog. All in all ok but nothing really new or useful for 99% of us that actually have bosses and need to pay the bill.

22 people found this helpful

Maria Davies

Milking the Point

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 30, 2017

Verified Purchase

I think the author is rather milking the point, which is against the ethos of his subject matter. I feel an easier read on the subject is Gary Keller's The One Thing.

29 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Wheat from the chaff

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 10, 2019

Verified Purchase

A bit late for my aged, scatty self to get round to focussing solely on what I most love and most need , but if even the Prodigal did it , so can I .
Following this book's advice , I find I am much happier planning and doing things in my little bit of the present I am conscious of , rather than regretting & blaming long lost , unchangeable circumstances or worrying about what most likely will never happen and this book helps to do just that . The book says we can only alter or try to alter stuff happening now , or "IN THE NOW" , should I write ? .
NB ,though it can help people focus , anxiety may need medical intervention first .

10 people found this helpful

Dr. Sven Jungmann

Gute Ratschläge, schön geschrieben, handlungsorientiert. Aber auch nicht-Essentialismus hat seinen Platz, wenigstens zeitweise.

Reviewed in Germany on March 23, 2016

Verified Purchase

Dieses Buch wurde mir von einem Freund empfohlen als ich ihn eingeladen habe, mit mir ein Projekt zu starten. "Nein Danke..." war seine spontane und verbindliche Antwort, verbunden mit dem Nachsatz: "...und damit Du verstehst warum, empfehle ich Dir McKeown's 'Essentialism'!"

Ich sprang bisher immer begeistert auf alle Gelegenheiten auf, die spannend wirkten, ein wenig wie ein Labrador-Welpe im Zoo. Das hat mich beruflich und persönlich weit gebracht. Aber ich stieß immer wieder auf eine Grenze, die in diesem Buch sehr deutlich beschrieben wird. Im Kern wir hier unterschieden zwischen Essentialisten die sich disziplinieren, ihr Leben nur einem klaren Ziel zu widmen und Nicht-Essentialisten, die vielem Zusagen, letztlich nichts wirklich gut machen und dabei sich selbst ausbrennen.

Dieses schön gestaltete Buch zeigt auf, wie sich das Leben eines Essentialisten von dem Anderer unterscheidet, warum es erstrebenswert ist zu vielen Dingen nein zu sagen, damit zu der einen Sache wirklich ja sagen kann, und wie man ein fokussiertes Leben führen kann. Ich finde es angenehm zu lesen und mir gefällt die handlungsorientierte Art des Buches.

Ich habe bereits angefangen, mein Leben auf Grundlage der Empfehlungen McKeown's teilweise umzustellen. Trotzdem würde ich meine Vergangen dreißig Jahre, die ich als nicht-Essentialist verbracht haben, nicht anders haben wollen. Alles kommt zu seiner Zeit und ich denke dieses Buch lohnt sich vor allem dann, wenn man sich innerlich bereit dafür fühlt.

74 people found this helpful

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