I really enjoyed
Make Your Life Better by Doing Less by Scott Young. People tend to focus on a better life by
adding things to our lives. But adding things spreads us thin, guaranteeing that we don't improve in where it really matters. Rather, we should subtract and focus on those things that really matter to us.
I think about my morning running habit. Or more accurately, my lack of running habit., You see, I used to run a few times a week, but I kept adding more to my plate. First it was a habit of reading Twitter for 5 minutes. Then I added Slack for 10 minutes. Oh and Hackernews. One cup of coffee. No, make that two.
Beyond filling my head with noise when I first wake up, it pushed my morning schedule and spread me thin. Sleeping in five minutes breaks my entire schedule and it's much easier to skip a run when I tell myself "I don't have the time".
Previously, I’ve asserted that the hard way is often the easy way. Committing to doing something you know will be hard, paradoxically, often results in an easier time than opting for something that seems easy.
This passage reminded me of when I decided to build Tanzawa instead of making a custom theme for Wordpress for my IndieWeb-ified blog. It's much harder to build your own CMS than to just point and click – but getting it the way I want is much easier.
Instead of clarifying our pursuits into the few, difficult obstacles they represent and deliberately crafting strategies for dealing with them, we’ve opted for a myriad of seemingly easy problems. Except the easy problems end up filling up our lives, leaving little room for what really matters.
I couldn't say it better myself.
