Greg McKeown

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  Effortless

  Written for people who already know what matters and are exhausted doing it. Instead of pushing harder, he argues, make the essential activities the easiest ones, so the answer to a hard task is an easier path rather than more effort.

  Source: gregmckeown.com: Effortless
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  Essentialism

  His 2014 book, and the argument the rest of his work rests on: almost everything is noise, a few things produce nearly all the results, and the discipline is in cutting rather than fitting more in. Explore, eliminate, execute, in that order.

  Source: gregmckeown.com: Essentialism
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  Hold Me Tight

  Points people at Sue Johnson's book as the place to start on adult attachment. Twenty three years married and working alongside his wife, he says he only recently understood there was an additional gear to the relationship.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #719 transcript
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  The Essentialism Planner

  He was under contract for a planner ten years earlier and got out of it, having decided the thing he was building was itself non essential. What he eventually published strips out most of what planners normally carry. It keeps a quarterly offsite, a weekly process, and a daily page that ends in a done for the day list. The planner is his own product.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #786 transcript
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Repeatable, mostly free routines with a defined trigger and dose.

• Habit stackingDoes itFREE, no cost

  Uses a BJ Fogg style recipe: after he complains, he says something he is thankful for. The first thing it taught him was how often he complains. In the family version the complainer owes three.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #510 transcript

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• Temptation bundlingDoes itFREE, no cost

  Listens to the great classics while running, exercising and traveling. He reckons he has got through a pile of them this year with no separate reading time.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #786 transcript

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• Vision settingDoes itFREE, no cost

  Two carefully worded pages at the front of his binder describe the fullest version of the life he thinks is available to him. Not goals, he says, and not shared with anyone.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #719 transcript

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• Monk ModeDoes itFREE, no cost

  Wrote Essentialism by shutting the world out: 5am to 1pm, five days a week, for around nine months, with an autoresponder warning people the reply would be late. Not one negative reaction came back, he says, and he calls an extreme routine a reasonable answer to an extreme era.

  Source: gregmckeown.com: The Magic of Being in Monk Mode

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• Personal Quarterly OffsiteDoes itFREE, no cost

  He and his wife Anna travel somewhere for a weekend and work through three questions: what essential thing are they under investing in, what non essential thing are they over investing in, and how to make the swap easy inside ninety days. An hour or two alone or with someone else still gets you somewhere, he says, and he likes doing it with an accountability partner.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #786 transcript

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• The 1-2-3 MethodDoes itFREE, no cost

  Writes six items and no more. Number one is the most essential thing of the day, which he frames as the most important person and the action for that person, then two that are essential and urgent, then three maintenance jobs. Pen and paper, not an app. He does not manage it every day, he says, but more often than not.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #719 transcript

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• Environment designRecommendsFREE, no cost

  Walk through tomorrow's schedule tonight and take friction out of each step. Running clothes laid out is the example he uses. The aim, in his framing, is to make the essential thing almost easier to do than to skip.

  Source: gregmckeown.com: How To Simplify Your Life In 5 Minutes A Day

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• Time blockingRecommendsFREE, no cost

  Write the six most important activities for tomorrow, cross off the bottom five, and give what survives a ninety minute window first thing. His supporting point is that priority stayed a singular word for five hundred years before anyone pluralized it.

  Source: gregmckeown.com: How To Simplify Your Life In 5 Minutes A Day

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• MicroburstRecommendsFREE, no cost

  Ten minutes on a timer, and the hard part is stopping when it rings rather than starting. Keep the session that length for ten days in a row before letting it grow. Doing that little beats doing nothing because you wanted to do it properly, he argues.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #786 transcript

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• Pre-MortemRecommendsFREE, no cost

  Ask what is most likely to stop the thing before it starts, then test whether the obstacle is real or an assumption carried over from last time. He ran the exercise with Navy SEAL leadership by asking commanders to draw their answers rather than write them.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #786 transcript

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• Saying No GracefullyRecommendsFREE, no cost

  Three steps: affirm the relationship, thank them sincerely for the opportunity, then decline firmly and politely. He points at E.B. White declining a committee seat in 1956 in three lines, and suggests starting on something trivial, like a lunch invitation sitting in your inbox.

  Source: gregmckeown.com: How to Say No Gracefully

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Daily practices held long enough to become default behavior.

• Daily readingDoes itFREE, no cost

  Reads scripture and long classic biographies, picked for being as far from the day's news cycle as he can get. He finished David McCullough's John Adams and said it left him thinking about what he wants to do with his son.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #355 transcript

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• Daily meditationDoes itFREE, no cost

  Says plainly that he meditates, without putting a frequency on it. Prayer and classic reading sit alongside it.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #355 transcript

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• Gratitude practiceDoes itFREE, no cost

  Gratitude is the skill he credits with carrying his family through the crisis he describes on the show. He used to file it under soft principles, he says, and no longer does.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #510 transcript

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• JournalingDoes itFREE, no cost

  Fourteen years of entries by his own count, and he does not think he has missed a day. He set an upper bound of five sentences and a lower bound of one, so day two never looks bigger than day one.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #786 transcript

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• Early risingDoes itFREE, no cost

  Kept the 5am start after finishing the book. He wrote that he had been in mourning since the arrangement ended, and was back at a version of it within a few weeks.

  Source: gregmckeown.com: The Magic of Being in Monk Mode

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• Phone-free first hourDoes itFREE, no cost

  The first thirty minutes go to paper and pen: no text, email or apps. Recently, he says, that has been more often than not rather than every morning.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #719 transcript

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• Weekly reviewDoes itFREE, no cost

  Sunday morning sits in his calendar for reading back through the few pages that set his direction. He says he knows how easily he gets lost.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #719 transcript

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• Daily prayerDoes itFREE, no cost

  Prayer is how he gets to what he calls the voice of clarity, and he prays on his quarterly offsites to feel a sense of direction. He is specific that it only works for him when it is not rote.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #355 transcript

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• Written goal sheetDoes itFREE, no cost

  Underneath the direction pages he keeps five or six roles with one goal attached to each, plus the handful of relationships he counts as the ones that cannot go wrong. The binder travels with him everywhere.

  Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #719 transcript

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• “That will be 14 years that I’ve kept a journal, and I don’t think I’ve missed a day. … But the reason is because my upper bound when I first started was five sentences and my lower bound was one sentence.”

  On Journaling

• “But what I learned about gratitude was this; if you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack. And if you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have.”

  On Gratitude practice

• “It means shutting out the world for a time. It is a relatively extreme approach to take, but we decided I would write from 5AM to 1PM every day. I did that for five days a week for about 9 months.”

  On Monk Mode

• “And I try now, more often than not, to have this power half an hour where I don’t go to text and email or apps or my phone for the first 30 minutes. And I do that. I haven’t been doing great at that recently, but I still do that more often than I don’t.”

  On Phone-free first hour

• “I certainly meditate. I pray. I pray when I’m on these offsites so that I can feel that sense of direction. I’ll bring literature with me that gets me centered.”

  On Daily prayer