That’s such a cliché phrase, but I recall it very often.
These days, I think of two less things I’d like to do:
- eat less
- and do less
Eat less is my new motto. Throughout my whole life, I was eating a lot. I was clearly overeating. It worked (I wasn’t fat) because I was eating not often, sometimes once or twice a day.
This may work, and even be a healthy diet, it turned out. Apparently, not for me: the doctor said I need to eat often, with small portions, and during the first half of the day.
Only these days, with me starting to get fat, I started to realise that controlling my meal size is a difficult endure. I’m still in that quest, and I’m getting some success. I’m paying my attention to that, and I notice that overeating is super easy.
I was at least months at this, if not years. On and off. The most recent attempt is about months long.
Doing less is my today’s thought, so I’d like to catch it too. Eating less is somewhat obvious, but doing less is less so.
My wife’s mother has this idiotic mentality, that my wife shares (sadly), where she blames people having a rest, just relaxing, or sleeping. Sleep is the fucking sin in her book.
It dawned on me, all of a sudden, that the bitch is the opposite of being smart, and also the opposite of a successful person that does a lot.
I realised that sleeping, having rest, or just relaxing, is super important for everyone who strives for effectiveness.
Peter fucking Druker wrote a fucking book about it, Effective Executive, and I’ve read it thrice. (It’s my favourite of his, but I haven’t read many yet.)
My wife’s mother or Peter Drucker? Hmmm, who’s smarter… 🤔 :thinks deeply:
It’s so obvious, it turned out. Nothing wrong with having a rest: if you do something, you spend energy, and you need to recover that energy. If you truly focused on quality, it takes energy.
A person like that, who’s stupid and pretending to be doing, instead of truly doing, wastes energy on non-doing. They could have been saving energy by non-doing, and perhaps they don’t need that much rest… but I think they need as much rest as the one who’s doing, if not more. It’s just that they feel no difference being rested or not, and they feel shame for it. Hence, they bully everyone, starting with themselves, for having that rest.
My only reaction to a stupido like that is: FUCK YOU! And I think that’s correct and healthy reaction.
I realised two things.
First, there are so many tasks out there, and when you’re limited on the resources, the most effective strategy is to finish them one-by-one. And being slow isn’t necessarily bad. It’s how the world works: some things take very slowly. But when you look back, you really surprised how fast that happened. Instead of moving uncontrollably, and fuss around, wobble, you methodically do one thing. Then you move to the next.
Having experienced ADHD, I understand that very well.
And second, instead of moving from one task to the next one, you can take some rest in-between the two. And then move to the next task. Hence, you’d do much less during one day. However, chances are, you’d be faster overall, because you’d have more energy to invest into the task at hand.
That’s so obvious, but it isn’t sometimes, for some reason.