The power of less en espaol pdf

The challenge: identify one habit you want to take on. Write this down as a plan. Publicly reveal your goal. Make sure you report back on your progress. Do this for a month. Once complete, celebrate this is a new habit! Principle 6: Start new habits in small increments to ensure success — by starting in small increments you will be able to maintain focus.

If you are spreading yourself too thin you are likely to struggle and give up early. Also, start with only gradual changes. If you usually consume 4 cups of coffee a day, try to reduce this to 3. Babauta explains that a common habit people want to adopt is waking earlier every morning. Babauta emphasises the importance of selecting just one goal.

This means that your focus is stronger and you are more likely to achieve your goal. When first beginning, Babauta recommends identifying a key goal that will take about month to complete. Consider making a step-by-step list of how you can achieve your goal, and each step is a mini sub-goal. This way, you only have to focus on one step at a time and everything will feel much more achievable.

By achieving steps more regularly your motivation will remain high. Every week, assess your goals and identify what steps you will take each day to reach the end goal. Breaking your goals down like this will mean that you can keep crossing things off your list and visibly feel like you are making progress. Remember that you need to stick with this goal until it is complete. Have a clear deadline and understand exactly what it is you want to achieve.

Babauta stresses the importance of identifying your most important tasks MITs each day. The goal you should have each day is to complete all three MITs. Anything else you achieve can be considered a bonus. Babauta also recommends having one of your MITs dedicated to your own goal, the other two can be work-related.

The best way to ensure that these tasks are achieved daily is to do them first. Never leave them until the end f the day. A lot of productivity authors recommend scheduling your entire day and relying on your calendar. But for a lot of people, this can be overwhelming. Babauta actually recommends living in the moment rather than being ruled by a calendar. If you understand your priorities, and only ever have a few MITs and goals going at one time, you should be in a position to make decisions on what work needs to be done and where.

Reducing your tasks is a good way to manage your time better, delegate anything you can and eliminate the unnecessary. Continue to simplify and reduce your tasks. The less you have to do, the less you have to organise. Babauta also recommends batching tasks together for optimum effectiveness. Many people have multiple email addresses or chat services that deliver messages and information all day.

Babauta explains that limiting your inboxes is going to be extremely beneficial in increasing your effectiveness. Do you really need more than one email address? Consider which sources of messages are the most important and eliminate the rest.

Also, only check your emails and messages twice a day, no more. Babauta recommends doing this at 10 am and 4 pm.

The best way to do this is from the bottom to the top. Take action on each email, never leave them sitting in the inbox. Your options are: delete, archive, reply, forward or add to your to-do list. Babauta recommends you use the delete key as much as possible, we often hold on to these kinds of things unnecessarily. There are three key things you need to consider when it comes to your internet usage. Awareness, consciousness, and focus. Babauta recommends you track your online time to become aware of your usage.

You can use an app or tool to do this. This can identify some of the top ways you are wasting time. Understand why you are using the internet and what your purpose is. What project will you focus on this week?

What tasks will you focus on today? Eliminate as many nonessential projects and tasks as possible. The essentials questions regarding your goals, and the impact of each project and task, are the most relevant. Worry about the nonessential ones tomorrow—or if you dare, just eliminate them. If you align your spending with your goals and values, you'll eliminate a lot of nonessential spending, and your finances will be better off.

Eventually you'll weed out the junk and get down to what is truly necessary and the things you truly love and use. It's something you have to revisit regularly, as new things accumulate, as your values and goals change, as you learn that you can live with less and less. If you go through an area of your life and eliminate many of the nonessentials, mark a date in your calendar to revisit that area, and continue the editing process over and over. And learn to enjoy the process, not to strive for a certain destination.

Simplifying isn't meant to leave your life empty—it's meant to leave space in your life for what you really want to do. Know what those things are before you start simplifying. Principle 3: Simplifying—Eliminating the Nonessential Once you've identified the essential, the task of simplifying is theoretically easy—you just have to eliminate all the nonessential. However, in practice this isn't always easy, although it does get less difficult the more you do it.

Let's say you have a task list, for example, and you've identified the top three things you need to do on that list. To simplify the list, you'd want to eliminate as many of the nonessential things on the list as possible—everything that's not identified as essential. So you start by crossing off the things that aren't really important, then delegating other tasks that can be done by co-workers, and finally postponing assignments that you do need to get done but that don't need to be done today.

The hard part comes when others want you to get something done, but you don't think it's essential. In that case, you'll have to learn to say "no. If that means telling people you don't have time to do more, then that's what the commitment means. And saying "no" gets easier with practice, especially as you gain confidence that sticking to the essential is something that will have great benefits to you in the long term. Additionally, others will start to respect you for being honest about what commitments you can take on without overloading yourself, and they will start to respect your time if you respect it first.

Simple Focus "With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. Focus on less to become more effective. Focus on One Goal in order to achieve it more on this later. Focus on the task at hand instead of multitasking, and you'll be more productive. Focus on the present, to reduce anxiety and stress. Principle 4: Focus is your most important tool in becoming more effective. Focus is the most important factor in determining whether you'll achieve a goal or stick to creating a new habit.

Not self-discipline, not rewards, not sheer willpower, not even motivation though this is also an important ingredient. If you can maintain your focus on a goal or habit, you will more often than not achieve that goal or create that habit.

If you can't maintain your focus, you won't achieve the goal, unless it's such an easy goal that it would have happened anyway It's that sim-pie. Focusing on the present can do a lot for you. It helps reduce stress, it helps you enjoy life to the fullest, and it can increase your effectiveness. Focusing on now, rather than the past or the future, isn't easy, and takes a lot of practice. We'll explore how to do this in the next section.

Have you ever completely lost yourself in a task, so that the world around you disappears? You lose track of time and are completely caught up in what you're doing. That's the popular concept of "flow" see page 63 , and it's an important ingredient in finding happiness—having work and leisure that gets you in this state of flow will almost undoubtedly lead to it.

People find their greatest enjoyment not when they're passively mindless, but when they're absorbed in a mindful challenge. The first step is to find work that you're passionate about.

Next, you need to clear away distractions and focus completely on the task you set before yourself. One of the key skills I've learned is how to be aware of my negative thoughts, and to replace them with positive thoughts. I learned this through quitting smoking and running—there are many times when you feel like giving up, and if you don't catch these negative thoughts in time, they'll fester and grow until you actually do give up. Instead, learn to focus on the positive. Think about how great you feel.

Think about how other people have done this, and that you can too. Think about how good it will feel when you accomplish what you're trying to do. Also, learn to see the positive in just about any situation. In my experience, this results in happiness, as you don't focus on the difficult or negative parts of your life, but on the good things. Be thankful for what you've been given. You're working on two projects at once when your boss places two new demands on your desk.

You're on the phone when three new e-mails come in. You're trying to get out the door on time so you can pick up a few groceries for dinner on the way home.

Your BlackBerry is going off and so is your cell phone. Your coworker stops by with a request for info and your Google Reader is filled with more than a hundred articles to read. You've learned to juggle tasks at high speed, worthy of this age of the Internet. In these days of instant technology, we are bombarded with an overload of information and demands of our time. But we're not designed to handle this kind of overload: Soon we are so overwhelmed with things to do that our system begins to fall apart.

Instead, I advocate single-tasking, focusing on one task at a time and working as simply as possible to preserve your mental health and to improve your effectiveness.

Here are a few quick reasons not to multitask: 1. Multitasking is less efficient, due to the need to switch gears for each new task and then switch back again. Multitasking is more complicated, and thus leaves you more prone to stress and errors. Multitasking can be crazy-making, and in this already chaotic world, we need to rein in the terror and find a little oasis of sanity and calm. Here's how to single-task instead: 1. First thing in the morning, work on your Most Important Task.

Don't do anything else until this is done. Give yourself a short break, then start on your next Most Important Task. If you can get two to three of these done in the morning, the rest of the day is gravy. When you are working on a task in a time block, turn off all other distractions. Shut off e-mail and the entire Internet if possible. Shut off your cell phone. Try not to answer your phone, if possible. Focus on that one task, and try to get it done without worrying about other stuff.

If you feel the urge to check your e-mail or switch to another task, stop yourself. Breathe deeply. Refbcus yourself. Get back to the task at hand. If other things come in while you're working, put them in your in-box, or take note of them in a small notebook or on a text file on your computer. Every now and then, when you've completed the task at hand, process your notes and in-box, adding the tasks to your to-do lists and refiguring your schedule if necessary.

Process your e-mail and other in-boxes at regular and predetermined intervals. There are times when an interruption is so urgent that you cannot put it off until you're done with the task at hand.

In that case, try to make a note of where you are writing down notes if you have time with the task at hand, and put all the documents or notes for that task together and aside perhaps in an "action" folder or project folder.

Then, when you come back to that task, you can pull out your folder and look at your notes to see where you left off. Take deep breaths, stretch, and take breaks now and then. Enjoy life. Go outside, and appreciate nature. Keep yourself sane. The only way to learn to focus on the present is to practice.

This might be hard to do at first. Your mind will wander, or you'll do a lot of "meta-thinking," which is just thinking about what you're thinking, and whether you're thinking it the right way, and whether there is a right way… and so on, until you're no longer in the present. That's normal. We all do that. Don't beat yourself up about that. Don't get discouraged.

Just practice. Practice in the morning. Practice while eating lunch. Practice during your evening jog or walk. Practice while washing dishes after dinner. Every opportunity you get, practice. And you'll get better. I promise. Here are some of the best ways to practice focusing on the present: 1.

When you eat, just eat. The best way to think about being present is this: Do just one thing at a time. When you are eating, don't read or think about something else or iron your clothes especially if you're eating something that might splatter on the clothes. Just eat. Pay attention to what you're eating. Really experience it—the taste, the texture. Do it slowly. Same thing with anything else: washing dishes, taking a shower, driving, working, playing. Don't do multiple things at once—just do what you're doing now, and nothing else.

Be aware. Another important step is to become more aware of your thoughts. You will inevitably think about the past and future. That's OK. Just become aware of those thoughts. Awareness will bring change. Be gentle. If you think about the past or future, do not beat yourself up about it!

Don't try to force those thoughts out of your head. Just be aware of them and gently allow them to leave. Then bring yourself back to the present. Exercise is my meditation. I run, and try to only run. I focus on my running, on my breathing, on my body, on nothing but the present. It's great practice. Daily routines. Anything can be your meditation. When you wash dishes, this is practice. This is your meditation. When you walk, focus on walking. Make anything you do become practice.

Put up reminders. A reminder on your fridge or computer desktop, or on your wall, is a good thing. Or use a reminder service to send you a daily e-mail. Whatever it takes to keep your focus on practicing being present. There is no failure. You will mess up, but that's OK, because it is impossible to mess up. The only thing that matters is that you practice, and over time, if you keep doing it, you will learn to focus on the present more often than you do now.

You cannot fail, even if you stop doing it for a while. Doing it at all is success. Celebrate every little success. Keep practicing. When you get frustrated, just take a deep breath. When you ask yourself, "What should 1 do now. There is a series of habit changes recommended in every chapter of this book, but if you attempt to master all of them at once, you'll be overwhelmed and your focus will be spread out too thin.

And in a matter of weeks, the changes you attempt will be for naught. Principle 5: Create new habits to make long-lasting improvements. Instead, the only way you'll form long-lasting habits is by applying the Power of Less: Focus on one habit at a time, one month at a time, so that you'll be able to focus all your energy on creating that one habit. The tool that you'll use to form each habit is an extremely powerful one: the Power of Less Challenge, a thirty-day challenge that has proven very effective in forming habits for thousands of readers of my Zen Habits blog.

Here's how it works: 1. Select one habit for the Challenge. Only one habit per month. You can choose any habit—whatever you think will have the biggest impact on your life. Write down your plan. You will need to specifically state what your goal will be each day, when you'll do it, what your "trigger" will be the event that will immediately precede the habit that's already a part of your routine—such as exercising right after you brush your teeth , and who you will report to see below.

Post your goal publicly. Tell as many people as possible that you are trying to form your new habit. I suggest an online forum, but you could e-mail it to coworkers and family and friends or otherwise get the word out to a large group. Report on your progress daily. Each day, tell the same group of people whether or not you succeeded at your goal.

Celebrate your new habit! After thirty days, you will have a new habit. You will still need to make sure you do the habit each day, but it'll be fairly well entrenched if you were consistent all month. Just the act of committing to the Challenge, and setting a measurable goal, and declaring it to a bunch of others, is a huge step toward making the habit change a success.

The daily check-in makes you want to do your daily habit, so you can report your success to others. There is a very positive feeling reward you get when you report that you did your habit today.

There is also value in reporting your struggles. For example, during one challenge, when I got sick for a few days, I asked my group to motivate me. They were extremely encouraging, and I got back into my habit. When you see everyone else doing so great, it's inspiring. If they can do it, so can you! And there are always some really inspiring people in each group of challengers. Now, you don't need to join the Monthly Challenge on the Zen Habits forums to achieve a positive habit change, but I highly recommend you find a group—online or off—to help you stick to your habit change.

There are plenty of online forums and community groups to help with these kinds of things—the power of a group can help leverage your power to change a habit. If you follow these rules, it would be hard for you not to form a new habit by the end of the thirty days. Do not break this rule, because I assure you that if you do multiple habits at once, you will be much less likely to succeed.

Trust me—I've tried both ways many times, and in my experience there is a ioo percent rate of failure for forming multiple habits at once, and a 50 to 80 percent rate of success if you do just one habit at a time—depending on whether you follow the rest of these rules. Don't decide to do something really hard, at least for now. Later, when you're good at habit changes, you can choose something harder. But for now, do something you know you can do every day.

In fact, choose something easier than you think you can do every day. If you think you can exercise for thirty minutes a day, choose ten minutes—making it super easy is one of the best ways to ensure you'll succeed. You should be able to say, definitively, whether you were successful or not today.

If you choose exercise, set a number of minutes or something similar twenty minutes of exercise daily, for example. Whatever your goal, have a measurement. You want to do your habit change at the same time every day, if possible. If you're going to exercise, do it at 7 a. This makes it more likely to become a habit. You could check in every two or three days, but you'll be more likely to succeed if you report daily. This has been proven over and over again in the Challenges.

Expect setbacks now and then, but just note them and move on. No embarrassment in this challenge. But if I had to recommend twelve habits to start with one each month for a year , these are the twelve I think could make the most difference in the lives of the average person more on each habit in later chapters : 1.

When you work on a task, don't switch to other tasks. Process your in-box to empty. Check e-mail just twice a day. Exercise five to ten minutes a day. Work while disconnected, with no distractions. Follow a morning routine. Eat more fruits and veggies every day. Keep your desk decluttered.

Say no to commitments and requests that aren't on your Short List see Chapter 13, Simple Commitments. Declutter your house for fifteen minutes a day. Stick to a five-sentence limit for e-mails. Start Small While YOU would do just fine if you only followed the first five principles of this book, Principle 6, Start Small, is simply a way to ensure the greatest likelihood of success for the rest of the changes.

Principle 6: Start new habits in small increments to ensure success. Oftentimes people are enthusiastic about making changes— whether it's about implementing a new productivity system or starting a new exercise program—so they start out with big ambitions.

The problem is that that enthusiasm often runs out of steam after a week or two, and the goal comes to failure. That's what happens with almost every New Year's resolution—people start out with a lot of enthusiasm but it dies down by the end of January. The solution is Principle 6: Start Small.

Follow this principle with everything you do: with any goal, with any habit change, with any change in your life. I've proven this principle over and over again in my life changes. When I start an exercise program, I will start with one that's as easy as possible, even if I know I can do more.

When I start with a new habit, I start with just a tiny habit change, even when I think I can handle more. When I decided to start waking earlier, I started by waking only fifteen minutes earlier. Focus, as we discussed in the section on Principle 4, is incredibly important in getting anything done. If you start an enterprise or life change trying to tackle a lot at once, you spread your focus and decrease your effectiveness.

But by starting small, you keep your focus narrowed, and therefore increase your power. By starting out doing less than you can actually handle, you build up energy and enthusiasm, kind of like water building up behind a dam. That built-up energy and enthusiasm ensures that you don't run out of steam early on, but can keep going for much longer.

Easier is better, especially in the beginning. If the change you're making is hard to stick to, you are making it more likely that you'll fail. Choose something so small that success is almost guaranteed. Sure, a small success is not as satisfying as a big success, but it's only small in the short term.

If you start out with a small success, you can build upon it, get another small success, and build upon that, and so on—until you have a series of small successes that add up to a very large success. And that's much better than a large failure. Think of dieting— when you go on a severe, drastic diet and you lose forty pounds in two months, it feels pretty great, but more often than not those forty pounds will come back, and then some.

But if you do small changes—perhaps one to two pounds a week—those pounds are much more likely to stay off. This has been proven repeatedly in weight loss studies and it works with any kind of change. Make gradual changes, in a series of small steps over time, and you're more likely to stick to those changes than if you attempt a big change all at once.

Always, and with anything. Any habit change you undertake, any exercise or productivity or life change, any goal or project or task—start small. Then go to the next small task, and so on. Simple Goals and Projects I'm as ambitious in setting goals as anyone I know—I often have several goals I'd like to achieve at work, along with self-improvement goals that can range from learning a new language to running a marathon. And while I've always been enthusiastic about setting and starting new goals, my list of things I want to achieve seems to grow faster than I progress on any of those goals.

It's easy to set goals, but extremely difficult to achieve them if they're goals worth achieving. Tackling a goal takes energy and focus and motivation, three things that are in limited supply in any person, no matter how driven. Taking on many goals at once spreads out your available energy and focus and motivation, so that you often run out of steam after the initial couple weeks of enthusiasm.

Then the goals sit there on your list, gathering dust, while you feel guilty about not achieving any of them. The Power of Less is perfect for achieving goals: Limit yourself to fewer goals, and you'll achieve more. At the same time, we'll look at ways to narrow your focus on your projects, so that you can complete them more effectively and move forward on your goals.

We'll apply limitations to our projects to increase our effectiveness. To break the goal into concrete steps, you will focus on one sub-goal at a time. Choose a goal. Make a list of things you'd like to accomplish over the next few years. This list might have ten things on it, or maybe twenty. Now, you could try to tackle all those goals at once, or take on as many as possible. But that will dilute your effectiveness. Instead, choose just one, and focus completely on that goal until you can check it off the list.

I'd recommend that you choose a goal that you really want to accomplish—the stronger your desire, the more likely you are to actually stick with that goal until you're finished. It's not enough to say, "It would be nice to achieve this goal. I also recommend that you choose a goal that will take about six months to a year to complete. Any longer than a year, and you will have problems maintaining your focus, and might become overwhelmed.

If it's much shorter than six months, it might not be something worthy of your efforts. What if you really want to achieve it, but it'll take two years or more? Break it down into sub-goals, so that your first sub-goal will take about a year. For example, if you want to become a lawyer, you have to get in to law school, and then complete three years of school, and then pass the bar exam. Make your first goal simply to be accepted into a decent law school—that'll take six months to a year.

Break it down to a sub-goal. Once you've decided on your One Goal, the next step is to focus on a smaller sub-goal that you can accomplish in the next month or two. In the law school example above, you might decide that your sub-goal will be to do research into some of the top law schools in the areas you prefer, to choose five schools, and to gather the essential information about each school. To shorten that, you might call this sub-goal something like, "Complete research on Top 5 schools.

If you don't break a goal into smaller steps, you can become overwhelmed by such a large and vague goal. You can't sit down today, for example, and get accepted into a law school. It's not something that's doable. So you have to break it into more doable steps. Weekly goal. Each week, create a weekly goal that will move you closer to your sub-goal.

So this week, using the example above, you might just want to find all the decent law schools in the areas you prefer, find their Web sites, and start reading about them. That would be your weekly goal. Daily action. Then each day, choose one action that will move you closer to your weekly goal. Make this action your most important task for the day. Do it first, before you do anything else. This will help keep you focused on your One Goal, instead of pushing it back when other, more pressing things come up.

This might sound complicated, but in action, it's fairly simple. You set a One Goal for the year it can be set at any time— you don't have to wait for January. You set a sub-goal that will take a month or two to complete. Each week you set a weekly goal. Each day you choose a task that will move you to that weekly goal, and make that your most important task of the day.

This One Goal system will keep you focused on achieving your goal, moving closer to it each day. It will keep you from spreading yourself too thin, and will allow you to focus all your energy on completing this goal. List all the projects you have going on in your life, including all your work projects, any personal and home projects, projects with civic organizations, and so on. Anything that would take a day or more to complete, to use a rough guideline.

If you can do it in an hour or two, you can still list it if you like—a project is usually something that takes several tasks to complete. How many items are on this list? If you're like most people, you probably have ten to twenty projects on this list.

If you're an overachiever or extremely busy, you might even have more. This isn't a good thing. Too many projects leads to ineffectiveness. Now I'm going to ask you to do something that might be a bit difficult for some of you: Choose just the top three projects on your list. Don't choose three from each area of your life— just choose three altogether. This list of three projects is your Simple Projects List. Everything else goes on a second list, which we'll call the "On Deck List.

They're on hold until you complete the three projects on your Simple Projects List. Let me make this point clear: In this system I'm recommending, you don't move a project from the On Deck List to the Simple Projects List until you finish all three projects on your Simple Projects List.

Not just one, but all three. Because this will ensure that you don't leave one of the top three projects sitting uncompleted while you keep moving new projects onto your active list. It will ensure that you focus on completion of all of your top three projects, not just one or two. The top three projects on your Simple Projects List will be your entire focus until you finish all three, and then the next three projects you move onto this active list will be your focus.

This ensures that you aren't spreading your focus too thin, and that you're completing your projects. I recommend that, at all times, you have at least one of your top three projects be related to your One Goal so that you are always moving that goal forward. Of the other two projects on your active list, you can choose another work- related goal and a personal goal if you like.

Whatever works best for your situation. Why not have just one project? If limiting yourself to three projects makes you more effective, why not limit yourself to one project to make yourself even more effective? You'd think this would be logical, especially as I recommended having just One Goal.

However, the reality is that almost every project is held up as you wait for information, for other people to get back to you, for others to complete tasks, for vendors or clients to do something. It's rare that you can start a project and work on it until it's finished, without any waiting. If this is possible, I suggest you do exactly that: Start a project and don't work on anything else until the project is completed.

Unfortunately, that's often not the case: We must wait for tasks or information or other things to be completed before we can move on to the next step. And so we multitask, but not on the task level—we multitask only on the project level.

While one project is on hold for an hour or a day or a few days, we can be working on another. I've found that three projects works best for this type of project-level multitasking—any more than three, and you begin to lose effectiveness.

For this system to work, a project should take no more than a month to complete, and preferably only a week or two. If a project takes a year to complete for example , then you will not be able to work on any other projects for a year.

That's too long to put the rest of your life on hold. Instead, break long-term projects into smaller projects that can be completed in a month or less. If you want to launch a magazine, for example, focus first on the project of coming up with a design, then on putting together a team, then on finding financial backing, and so on.

We might get caught up in organizing the project, in laying out a task list and timeline, and assigning tasks to different team members. We might get caught up in meetings about our projects, in sending e-mails, and in instant-messaging people about the project. We might get caught up in the technology of it. But the real focus of any project should be in getting it done. Each day, put your focus on moving your project forward to completion. Put aside distractions, and put all of your energy into one project at a time—you can switch to another of your three active projects when necessary, but at any given moment, just focus on one project.

And move it closer to completion, until you're done. How will you know when your project is complete? You should have a clearly defined outcome. Visualize what the project will look like when you're done. Then write this down in a sentence or two, next to the project title on your Simple Projects List.

The fatherhood motivates him to become the happiest person in the world, for the sake of his six children. His methods are helpful and easy to follow, six essential principles represent the core of them. Second, every person has its roots, meaning — place confidence in hidden values and purposes. Babauta advises each and everyone to trim away some things, which are responsible only for failures and depression.

Ancient philosophers approached life with little knowledge; they stood for understanding the essence of our existence not buying happiness with money. Their subtle messages intrigued Rulers and Conquerors back in those days. Mysteries torment our minds even today.

We as humans have difficulties to answer all the questions, especially not this one. Restrictions and boundaries are two separate terms 2. Make up a list 3. Success is an output of happiness.

Limitations are not the same as boundaries. If your life is spiraling out of control, the perfect remedy would be to set certain restrictions and avoid complications. The point is dealing with objectives, assignments or responsibilities that influence your life.

Ask yourself- What duties seriously affect my career and has a significant impact on my life? All your energy, will-power and motivation must be directed towards these vital goals.

If they seem too big, break down your goals into smaller pieces and start chewing them. To achieve success two things are crucial: Focus and willpower. If you cannot stay focused on your task, it is better to quit and focus on something else.