Leo Babauta is the author of one of the top inspirational blogs on the internet, ZenHabits.net. His latest book is called Power of Less which is a book that purports to help increase productivity while decreasing your workload by focusing on the essential. His productivity tips are based on six main principles discussed in the first half of the book. Let's take a look under the cover.

Introduction

Leo lays out the two primary working points of this book in the Introduction:

1. Identify the essential.
2. Eliminate the rest.

Chapter 1 – Why Less is Powerful

This is the wisdom that I am working toward applying to every area of my life. Using the analogy of the Haiku poem, he illustrates his philosophy with the following:

"The haiku, as you may know, is usually a nature-related poem of just seventeen syllables, written in three lines (five syllables, then seven, then five). A poet writing a haiku must work with those limitations, must express an entire idea or image in only that number of syllables … He can quickly whip out seventeen syllables and have a completed haiku in a short amount of time; or he can carefully choose only the essential words and images needed to convey his idea. And this second choice is what creates some of the most powerful poetry in such a limited form — choosing only the essential."

This is in the hopes that by simplifying every area of your life, that you will have the time and resources to do the things that are truly important in your life. This will also empower you to limit doing the myriad of unimportant tasks in your life that are generally wasteful of your time.

If you have too much clutter in your home, limit yourself to “X” number of possessions. I am attempting to do this now by setting limits to the number of books, CD’s, items of clothing etc. as I have identified these as primary sources of clutter.

Likewise, limit your projects to 1-2 and to limit idol surfing and email to once or twice a day, at designated moments in your routine.

Chapter 2- The Art of Setting Limits

The problem with having too much stuff is that you have no time in your life to enjoy it. You may find yourself rushing through a book just to get it done and onto the next one in queue, or worse, they may just pile up unread. Limiting these distractions preserves your life energy and allows you to focus on the most important things.

Therefore setting limits is necessary. This process is both experimental and experiential. You may find that checking email twice a day is not enough, perhaps because your job requires you to get your next work item out of email. That’s fine, then set a different limit. Leo comments that there really is no one-size-fits-all set of rules for this.

Chapter 3 – Choosing the Essential and Simplifying

In order to know what to eliminate, you have to know what is essential, the idea being that everything else that is not essential can be eliminated. There are a fair few of helpful questions listed in this chapter that once can use to evaluate and identify the essential in their life.

Chapter 4 – Simple Focus

Focus on one goal at a time and focus on this moment only. This chapter talks about the concept of Flow, in which you become so entrenched in a task that you lose track of time. I often do this when writing music or poetry. As these are “Essential tasks” for me in that I highly value my creative side, it is important that I try to get in the Flow each time I do these tasks. Flow is the natural state for humans, and quite frankly, I get rather cranky when I am doing tasks that I just can’t get into. This chapter is where Leo discusses his concept of Single Tasking in depth, which is arguably more efficient than multi-tasking.

Chapter 5 – Create New Habits and The Power of Less Challenge

Leo outlines his plan for creating new habits in this chapter. Basically, pick one new habit at a time and spend thirty consecutive days implementing that habit. It is arguable whether thirty days is sufficient, or too much time. I tend to believe that twenty-one days is sufficient and have often put that into practice successfully, but there is nothing wrong with building the buffer days in there to help ingrain the habit. I am currently in the middle of a challenge of writing poetry for fifteen minutes a day, everyday for thirty days. My goal is to put together a full-length book of poetry by next spring.

Leo’s philosophy of creating only one goal at a time is an excellent one. We all start the New Year with a set of resolutions, myself included, and often within a few weeks, we lose our focus.  Having one goal is easier to focus on and to be mindful of with your daily tasks.

Chapter 6 – Start Small

In this chapter, Leo cautions the reader to start small with every new habit, do less than you think you can. For example, I could have set a goal that I would write poetry for one hour every day or that I would get on the treadmill for one hour every day, but instead I set it to fifteen minutes, as this is achievable and I won’t get frustrated trying to start this new habit(s). It is easier to ramp up later once the habit is ingrained.

Part 2 – The remainder of this book takes the principles laid forth in the first six chapters and puts them into practice. This is the meat and potatoes of the book and I won’t go further into this as I think it is truly important that readers experience this for themselves. There are a number of practical guidelines in the second half of the book and I found myself working on them as I read the book i.e. setting simple goals and projects, setting task lists and project lists.

There are also chapters on Simple Email, Simple Time Management, Simple Filing and Simple Daily Routine.

So, is The Power of Less worth reading?

Very few books remain on my bookshelf after I read them and even fewer do I find myself re-reading. This book is one that I plan to re-read regularly.

My favorite chapter was Chapter 15, Declutter Your Workspace, and I'll be spending this weekend going through every piece of paper on my desk and actioning them. All I want on my desk is my laptop, IPOD, a pencil, my small Moleskine for jotting down all tasks that I need to get out of my head (per Chapter 1) and the notes that I take for a particular post. A peaceful desk is very conducive to completing my most important tasks.

The book is a short read at 170 pages and faithful readers of Leo’s blog ZenHabits.net and his prior book Zen to Done: The Ultimate Simple Productivity System may be familiar with some of the concepts in this book. However, I highly recommend this book because the entire system is laid out here for the first time and the philosophy (or the “Why”) is also given its due. I like this book better than David Allen’s Getting Things Done as I found Leo's to be more accessible where as Allen’s book often seemed to be more of a collection of very useful hacks.