reading

Introduction

‘Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.’

I’ve been known as the queen of multitasking for too long. Whether from a misguided sense of duty to ‘do everything’, a constant fear of ‘losing out’ or an innate need to be ‘in control’, I’ve tried to juggle more things than any sane person should attempt or want to do. My phone has been like an umbilical cord and email has ruled my life. Mindfulness was remembering to pick up my keys before I left the house.

Sound familiar? Have you ever found yourself checking your emails or texts while having dinner with your family or friends? Do you feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day, that you run around getting nowhere fast? Do you wish you could put what really matters first in your life, but struggle to figure out how?

It’s so easy to justify why we do the things we do, but when we take a closer look we begin to see and understand the true consequences of our constant ‘busyness’. Are we genuinely enjoying our lives, doing what we love and being with the people who matter? Or are we rushing from one task to the next, trying to be all things to all people, and not feeling like we have the time or energy to give anything or anyone the attention they deserve?

The comfort of being busy

Some time ago my world fell apart when my gorgeous, wonderful partner passed away. He wasn’t just my partner, he was my beautiful son’s dad, and he was an awesome dad. My coping mechanism was to occupy every minute of my time so that I would have none left to think. It helped me survive, but now I realize I let it possess me like an inner demon. I became trapped in a straitjacket of my own making; if my mind wandered I’d just pull the ties tighter with more responsibilities, more emails, projects, people, more, more, more …

And then my son said to me, ‘Mummy, you’re always busy.’ I looked back at him. It had taken the eyes of a child to show me what was happening. The light bulb went on. It was time for me to make some decisions about what was really important and start filtering out the noise to hear my own voice – and listen to what it was saying.

When I did that, I realized that the successful projects and relationships in my life – the ones I really connected with, the ones I really wanted – all had something in common: they worked because I gave them my attention at the right moments.

When I work with entrepreneurs and people starting up their own businesses, I always encourage them to identify the one thing they can do that day that will make the biggest difference. Not the five things or even the three things: the one thing.

Most people seem to believe they need to do more, when really they just need to do what matters. To filter out the distractions and focus on the things that make the difference between surviving and thriving, between playing catch-up and being in the lead.

To become world class at this, you have to give yourself a bit of time and space to let go, let the real you unfold. (Reading this book is perfect.) When you are thinking clearly, you can more easily discover what it is you really want, and then you need consciously to prioritize it; to discriminate between the things that help you grow and the things that set you back – or at least keep you standing still.

To make this a reality requires honest, deep thinking, and you must follow that with action. We all place limitations on ourselves, often subconsciously, and until you uncover them, face them and free yourself of them, you’ll be stuck on life’s hamster wheel.

It’s time to look your fears and excuses in the face and prepare to jump out of your comfort zone, to start taking control of your life and to forge time for yourself and the things that matter. Your destination is happiness, and you can enjoy every moment of the journey.

Why are you waiting to be truly happy?

According to recent research from the Royal Economic Society, most people’s lifetime happiness curve is U-shaped. Our happiness is high in our youth, starts to trail off by the time we are just twenty-five and doesn’t pick up again until we retire. Unsurprisingly, this research indicates that our happiest times are when our lives are simplest, and the pressures of expectation from work and family commitments are at their lowest. That leaves forty years in between – the period when we are considered to be in our mental and physical prime, but during which too many of us settle for being ‘crazy busy’ and just moderately happy. That’s scary. Do we really want to defer living life at its best until we retire?

Of course, this book isn’t a ‘how to find happiness’ manual, much though I’d like it to be. Sadly, there is no secret formula that will solve all life’s problems. The best we can do is help each other illuminate the dark corners. My aim is to provide a wake-up call to remind you that it’s possible to grab your own happiness and show you how to do it. This book is about living life to the fullest and not squandering it. It is for anyone who has something to change and the desire to do so. It’s particularly useful for those with short attention spans and tight schedules. People who want to know how, not just why.

I thought about calling this book How to Get More Out of Life, but it isn’t about ‘getting more stuff’. This book is about taking what you already have and making the most of it – and in order to do so you may need to let go of a few things in the process. It’s about squeezing every last drop out of life while you have the time to appreciate it. Getting the best from life is about digging down to the core of who you really are, what you really want and what makes you truly happy, then making the changes necessary to focus on those things.

It’s about reconnecting with the things that make you smile and your heart sing, the pursuits, the people and the work that give you lasting happiness, the dreams that linger unfulfilled, the adventures you’ve yet to set off on, the businesses you’ve always wanted to set up, the places you’ve wished you’d travelled to, the restaurants you’ve never eaten in, the lives you want to change, the house by the sea, the yoga at dawn, the book that’s never been written, the life you imagined. This isn’t a fairy tale, and neither is it wishful thinking. Many, if not most, of the things that will create your best life are perfectly attainable if you are willing to stop doing what’s not important and start prioritizing what is.

You can do anything … but you can’t do everything. At least not at the same time.

Relight your fire

This isn’t a book about time management either, but it will help you to prioritize how and where you invest your time to create a life you love.

I’m not going to suggest you sell everything you own and go backpacking around the world (although if that’s your dream, I’m certainly not going to advise against it). What I will teach you are practical ways to create change, now. It’s about appreciating the life you already have and making it better. We’re renovating here, not rebuilding.

Most of you reading this book already have a pretty decent life – you just might be so caught up in being busy you’ve forgotten what it looks like. You have a roof over your head, whether you rent or own; you go on holidays; perhaps you have kids and/or a partner; you definitely have friends and colleagues; you have a job or run your own business. Most of all, you have dreams.

This book is about how we resurrect those dreams and bring more of them to life, by spending less time doing the things we are conditioned to believe we ought to do and more time doing the things we love to do. It’s about relighting your fire and discovering your courage. It’s about knowing that you can’t please all of the people all of the time … and that’s OK.

ought: used to give advice, indicate duty or correctness; an expected state

There will be tough times, when you’re going to have to face up to your own culpability in holding yourself back (we all do it), but there will be plenty of eureka moments, too. Moments when you realize a few simple changes can make a big difference. That getting the best out of life is possible for everyone, not just a select few.

You may think that some of the things I suggest are simplistic, but the truth is we overcomplicate our lives enough. By keeping things simple, we give ourselves a chance of actually succeeding.

Don’t dismiss ideas because they seem too simple; that’s exactly why they will work.

The best lawyers and accountants are the ones who talk to their clients in everyday language, the ones who don’t feel the need to impress people with jargon. The same is true here; if I can get you results in fewer than 250 pages, why give you 500? If you can make meaningful change using simple tools, why give you complicated ones?

Small changes can make a BIG difference

Sometimes life gets so complicated it feels like it doesn’t even belong to you any more. You crave simplicity but seem like a bystander watching your own life pass by, helpless to intervene. You can’t even begin to think of how you could be less busy, whether you have a demanding boss or you’re running your own show. You have a desire to make the most of your skills and your passions. You want to stop running round in circles and instead focus on getting the stuff that’s important done, but you just have so much to do, you can’t find the time.

However, when you begin to make even the smallest of changes, you start to reclaim your power to prioritize what’s truly important. You might put down this book and shed one of your weekly tasks: perhaps by hiring a cleaner for your home or someone to mow your lawn. Or you might decide to park a project that is giving you sleepless nights for little return. The best way to climb a mountain is to take small steps.

As you begin to make changes in your life and put your intentions and ideas into action, you will gradually remove the limitations that are holding you back – whether you have put those limitations on yourself or you’ve allowed others to impose them. You will realize that the one person in control of your life is you. It’s up to you whether you want to keep all those plates spinning at the same time, or let one rest for a while, or even drop it altogether. If you want to find more time for your family, write a book or take the leap and start your own business: you can do it. Anything is possible when you stop trying to do everything at once.

When less is better

To simplify a little and focus on your priorities doesn’t diminish your life; it makes it better. I used to think that ‘mindfulness’ was something people used as an excuse to be lazy until I realized that appearing productive – filling every moment of the day with tasks and activities – is not the same as being productive. ‘Presenteeism’ isn’t the same as being present and fully focused.

When we embrace the ‘less is more’ attitude to life, work and everything in between, we appreciate all the good things we already have. We gather the courage to prune our lives of things and people that aren’t so good for us in order that we can grow. When you begin truly to value your time, you have the space in which to identify exciting new opportunities, rather than being weighed down by all those commitments you’ve agreed to take on when your heart and your gut were crying out ‘NO THANK YOU’. You become an expert in what you’re really good at and passionate about, rather than a jack of all trades and master of none.

When you stop trying to do so much, you get so much more done.

How to use this book

This is your book, so it’s about you getting the best out of your life, not someone else’s.

To make a successful change and begin to achieve more by doing less, you first need to take stock. You need to evaluate exactly what’s currently missing or undervalued and what you want out of your life. And you need to recognize what is coming between you and the things that really matter; whether that’s success, relationships, health or financial freedom.

All too often, it is fear that keeps us stuck in our patterns. If we’re super busy then of course we must be doing OK: no one can point to us and say we’re not working hard. Our culture has normalized being stressed, frazzled, running on empty.

But deep down we sense there might be another, more enjoyable and more productive way. We know that if we had the courage of our convictions and followed our true passions then we would break out of the trap. The lesson here is always to be open to moments of transformation; it is often when life feels scary that the biggest breakthroughs will come.

Once you begin to understand that our biggest opportunities may lie within our fears, then you can start to look at fear differently, as something to be embraced and unravelled rather than hidden from or ignored.

The next step is to understand what is important to you and your happiness. This isn’t always as easy as we might think, because most of us have been conditioned from an early age to ‘know’ what we should and shouldn’t want. If you’re a parent, you’ll appreciate the almost instantaneous guilt you feel the moment you take a second to breathe, let alone take a whole day for yourself. This isn’t about what your parents, partner, friends or children want for you or what they think you should want for yourself. This is about what you want and what you need to change or stop doing in order to get it. To be the best parent, partner or friend when the plane is going down you need to put your own oxygen mask on first.

Once you’re clear on what you want, I’ll show you how to filter, prune, prioritize and focus. These are some of the productivity tools that enable you to achieve much more in less time. You need to identify what really matters first to make the tools super effective.

It’s a chain reaction – recognize where you are, see where you want to be and then work out the best and quickest route to get there. Who can you ask for help? What tasks can you outsource or delegate? What are the important deadlines you need to meet? What skills, knowledge or experience do you need to finish what you start? What can you stop doing? What can you say no to more often, so that you have more time to say yes to the things that matter?

The world is full of opportunities, but sometimes the best opportunity is to learn to filter out the most important, meaningful ones. That way, you can give them 100 per cent of your attention, nail them, and then be able to lead a fulfilled life, not just a productive one.

Do the right thing at the right time, rather than trying to do everything all of the time.

Is your life how you imagined it would be, or is the reality more complicated and stressful than you planned? Do you get to the end of the day and wonder what you managed to achieve in between all the emails and phone calls, the endless meetings, the to-do list that just seems never to get done?

You hardly get a moment to yourself, you’re so busy pushing ahead, but you’re still not able to break through and be the person you really want to be. You’re not getting the chance – you’re constantly doing ‘stuff’ yet often struggle to finish what you start: there are just too many things vying for your attention.

Perhaps you have a great job but spend three hours every day commuting to the office and back, so that by the evening your spare time is just recovery time.

Maybe you’re juggling being a parent with running a business or holding down a job, feeling that every day you spread yourself a little bit thinner and just don’t have enough energy or attention to go round.

Or you might have managed to cut your commute to zero by going freelance, but don’t know how to value your time or which potential projects will give you the best return. Instead, you end up trying to pitch for everything.

You might love taking on new challenges, and have fresh and exciting ideas every day of the week, but you don’t have time to see them through to fruition. Now you’re struggling even to know which is the right opportunity to focus on.

Or you’d love the luxury of following what your heart tells you, but you’re more concerned right now with paying the mortgage and keeping your job. The idea of doing less fills you with dread that everything will simply fall apart.

You might be trying to make your mark in your industry or company, being the ‘go to’ person your manager always relies on. How can you stand out from the crowd unless you are ever the willing volunteer?

It feels like there isn’t any time left to think, to wander in the park or just sit by the water. To ‘just sit’ is a luxury you can’t afford, and even on the odd occasions when you do, a tumble of thoughts about all the things you haven’t managed to do come crashing in and make true relaxation impossible.

We have so many opportunities today that sometimes, what started out as a sweet-shop of choices begins to turn into a workhouse of chores under the pressure to be everything to everyone, to be professionally successful and an amazing parent, to be the first into the office and the last to leave, to be in three places at once, and to be not just dependable but indispensable.

Busyness has become equated with productivity, but the opposite is true. Every time you are distracted from one task by something or someone else it takes on average eleven minutes to get your focus back. Conversely, if you try to concentrate on one piece of work for longer than ninety minutes without taking a break, you are actually likely to be unproductive – you could be recharging your energy with a wander outside. Saying yes to every request so that you become the ‘go to’ person isn’t best for you or anyone else; instead, you end up spreading yourself too thin and taking on tasks that others could do better.

	FILTER IDENTIFY WHAT AND WHO IS IMPORTANT

	PRUNE LET GO OF WHAT ISN’T IMPORTANT

	PRIORITIZE BRING WHAT MATTERS IN YOUR LIFE TO THE FRONT OF THE QUEUE

	FOCUS DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND DO IT REALLY WELL

PORTFOLIO

Contents

THE BEGINNING