PDF Summary:Effortless, by Greg McKeown

In today’s hustle culture, many people think the only way to live a productive and rewarding life is to work as hard as possible. This idea is so ingrained in our culture that many work to the point of near-constant exhaustion, sacrificing their mental and physical health. But according to business strategist Greg McKeown, there’s an easier way to get the most out of your time and effort. In Effortless, he expands on this one simple truth: Achieving your goals doesn’t have to be so hard. By simply taking the easiest path, we can be healthier, happier, and more productive.

In our guide, we’ll lay out McKeown’s argument that the easiest path to success is the most viable, and we’ll provide actionable advice on how to implement this idea into your daily life. We’ll also further explore McKeown’s main points by comparing and contrasting them to other ideas in books on productivity and happiness.

(continued)... On top of our need to rest during the day is our need for regular sleep. Lack of sleep can cause considerable harm to our minds and bodies. People who get less than seven hours of sleep a night have weakened motor skills and cognitive abilities. They’re less alert, creative, and social. In the long term, they’re much more likely to suffer from heart disease, stroke, depression, diabetes, and other health issues. According to McKeown, you can improve the quantity and quality of your sleep by going to bed at the same time every night, turning off electronic devices before you sleep, and taking a hot bath or shower before bedtime.

Getting Better Sleep

In Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker goes into further detail on the effects of sleep deprivation and gives more tips for better sleeping habits. Walker identifies three key ways sleep deprivation harms the brain: it worsens attention and concentration, it hinders emotional control, and it can lead to Alzheimer’s disease. Some people may think they can get by on less sleep, but this is probably untrue: Studies show that less than 1% of people can get less than six hours of sleep with no negative effects.

Like McKeown, Walker also recommends avoiding artificial light before bed and keeping a regular sleep schedule. He also gives some other tips to help you get better sleep:

• Practice sleep hygiene. On top of reducing light, reduce the temperature and noise in your bedroom.

• Avoid alcohol, caffeine, and naps before bedtime.

• Exercise daily, as it increases the amount and quality of sleep.

• Eat a healthy diet.

• Avoid sleeping pills.

Stay in the Moment

Staying in the moment is a key ingredient of reaching an effortless mindset. In modern society, with its countless distractions and access to seemingly limitless information, it can be hard to remain focused. However, McKeown says that with practice, you can learn to limit these distractions and maintain alertness and awareness. You can do so by being mindful of your thoughts and intentional in your actions. This will help you be more productive and have stronger relationships. To reach an effortless mindset, McKeown recommends a daily ritual that combines some of his previous advice:

1. Clear your physical space: Find a quiet room or space, and take a moment to tidy it up. Turn off your phone and remove any other distractions.
2. Relax: Sit comfortably for a few minutes, close your eyes, and breathe. Release tension from your body.
3. Practice mindfulness: Acknowledge your thoughts, then let them go.
4. Practice gratefulness: Remind yourself of the things you’re thankful for.

How to Focus

An effortless mindset requires intense focus, something many struggle with. In Hyperfocus, Chris Bailey advises how to stay focused and in the moment. To hyperfocus, intentionally direct your attention to a single task by following a five-step process:

• Choose when to focus: Decide when and for how long you’ll hyperfocus. Choose a period of time that can be easily attained. As you get more accustomed to hyperfocusing, you can increase the duration.

• Choose what to focus on: Consider how impactful different tasks are, and do the most impactful ones first. To determine how impactful a task is, evaluate the immediate and long-term effects.

• Limit and manage distractions: People struggle to avoid distractions if they’re available, so limit them as best you can. If a distraction pops up, keep your original goal in mind until it passes.

• Use mindfulness and meditation: Meditation and mindfulness help improve your working memory, which helps you perform more complex tasks and maintain focus. To meditate, focus on a single thing, like your breathing. To practice mindfulness, pay attention to everything you’re experiencing in a single moment. Go through each of your senses and take mental note of what you perceive.

• Prevent your mind from wandering: To do this, perform tasks that match your skill level. Tasks that are too easy can be boring, and tasks that are too difficult can induce anxiety, both of which lead to mind-wandering.

Effortless Progress

Once you reach an effortless mindset, you can take the next step: making effortless progress. By this, McKeown doesn’t mean you’ll achieve more with no effort but that you’ll achieve more with less effort. If you’re in a well-rested, attentive state, you can now add these simple tools to your arsenal to help get things done.

First, clearly define what you’re trying to achieve. Then, instead of overthinking, simply begin. As you progress, you’ll learn to simplify the process and work at a sustainable pace.

Know When You’re Finished

According to McKeown, before beginning a project, clearly define at what stage it will be complete. This may seem obvious, but it’s a step people often overlook, which costs them more time and energy later. This is because, at a certain point, the more you work on something, the less you get done—what economists call the law of diminishing returns. To avoid this, your definition of “done” should be set at the point just before the law of diminishing returns sets in. For example, if you’re working on a business presentation, tell yourself it’s completed when the vital material is portrayed clearly and concisely, without adding too many pictures or superfluous information.

(Shortform note: In Getting Things Done, David Allen agrees with McKeown that envisioning the outcome of a project will help you achieve it, but he also recommends you first define your purpose in completing it. This is because knowing your purpose can help you find your definition of done: If you don’t know why you’re doing something, it will be much harder to know what you need to do. Additionally, knowing your purpose can also help you determine what tasks are most important and provide motivation and clarity to your project.)

Take the First Step

Once you’ve defined what finished looks like, McKeown advises taking the first step immediately. Many people are slow to get started on an important project because it feels overwhelming. You can avoid this feeling by taking the tiniest step you can take to begin. For example, if you need to read and respond to work-related emails, the first step isn’t reading the emails—it’s simply sitting in front of your computer. Once you take that tiny first step, the momentum builds from there.

(Shortform note: For more advice on how to take the first step, we can look to James Clear’s Atomic Habits. He recommends using the two-minute rule. Instead of committing to an entire activity, commit to the first two minutes to get the ball rolling. After that, continue breaking down the activity into two-minute increments. If you break an effortful activity into two-minute chunks, the perceived effort becomes much more palatable, thus increasing the likelihood you continue the activity.)

Embrace Mistakes

Another common trait people share is perfectionism—being too self-critical. This, according to McKeown, prevents effortless progress. If you try to get everything right the first time, you accomplish very little. Instead, by simply starting a project, embracing the mistakes, and fixing them quickly, you’re much more productive. To be less demanding of yourself, do the following:

1. Be kind to yourself: Instead of criticizing yourself for failures or mistakes, commend yourself for your accomplishments.
2. Lower your expectations: When working on a project or task, have the courage to begin without worrying about how bad it is.

More Strategies to Avoid Perfectionism

McKeown believes the perfectionist standards we set for ourselves are unrealistic and unproductive. In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brown delves further into the dangers of perfectionism and how to combat them. She argues that perfectionism is really about controlling how others see us. We try to project a perfect image of ourselves to gain acceptance from others. But perfectionism is dangerous because it’s impossible to be or seem perfect, and to try to do so is to set yourself up for failure. Thus, like McKeown, she argues that you must have lower expectations of your own perfection—to be happy and successful, you must continue to move forward while acknowledging that you’ll make mistakes along the way.

Also like McKeown, Brown recommends self-compassion to fight perfectionism. She further advises coming to terms with your shame and vulnerability. You must not only embrace mistakes but also the negative feelings that come with them. A perfectionist tries to avoid things like shame and judgment, but if you accept that such feelings are unavoidable, you take away their power and control over you.

Remove Unnecessary Steps

A key tenet of Effortless is to make things as simple as possible. McKeown recommends simplifying the work process by determining the most essential steps and removing the rest. Usually, in our attempt to make things easier, we simplify existing steps in a process. A more effective route is to remove steps entirely. To do this, determine the smallest amount of steps it would take to get to your desired outcome, and only perform tasks that add significant value.

Say you’re a journalist assigned to report on the public’s reaction to a new apartment complex. You may be tempted to interview dozens of people, make a detailed case for the pros and cons of the project, and look at the story from every conceivable angle. Instead, you take McKeown’s approach. You ask yourself what’s most important, and determine that the main things people care about are how much the project will cost and the benefits it will bring to the city. So you remove any steps that don’t support those two angles. It may not be the most masterful story, but it gets the job done. Most importantly, you expended minimal time and effort.

Apply Agile Thinking

A great deal of McKeown’s advice on effortless progress is based on the Agile Manifesto, a set of principles for efficient software development. For more tips on how to maximize the steps not taken, we can look to Scrum. This was written by business expert Jeff Sutherland, one of the original creators of the Agile Manifesto.

When taking on a complex project, McKeown says to simplify the process by determining the smallest number of steps it would take to finish and going from there. In Scrum, Sutherland recommends removing steps by first writing down every possible step and then ranking them by importance. Once you make your list, start working on the most important tasks first, and leave out the tasks at the bottom of the list. While this will take a little more time in the beginning, it will save you lots of time in the end by helping to clarify the steps that bring the most value to the project.

Pace Yourself

McKeown claims that finding the right pace of work is essential to making effortless progress. If you work too quickly or too much early on, you’ll inevitably hit a point where you can’t keep the momentum going. If you work too little, you may lose the motivation to continue. The goal, then, is to find the ideal range of effort to put in each day.

Finding this range will take trial and error, but the key is to determine the minimum and maximum amount of daily effort that works best for you. The minimum should be easily achievable but enough to constitute progress, and the maximum should be the most you feel you can do on a daily basis without getting exhausted. Having a limit on daily effort can sometimes seem counterintuitive, as you may feel that when you’re on a roll, you should keep going. But doing so can lead to a habit of overexertion and underachievement. No matter the task, find that sweet spot of productivity and stick to it.

Find a Work-Life Balance

In The 5 AM Club, Robin Sharma also recognizes the importance of sustainable progress that McKeown supports. Sharma argues that to be productive and creative, you must take the time to recharge your mental and physical capacities. Taking time off not only helps you avoid burnout but also strengthens your mind and body. To accomplish the most, you must find a balance between work and restoration.

Another way to pace yourself is to consider your level of ambition. In Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday argues that maintaining a balance between too much and too little ambition can help you find success. This balance can be difficult to find. It’s easy to work relentlessly toward your goals and not realize it until you burn out. But it’s also easy to lose motivation and stop working toward your goals. You must know when to push yourself and when to stop to maintain long-term success.

Effortless Success

McKeown’s final stage of effortless productivity is learning how to apply your actions to produce consistent, compounding results. In the effortless progress section, we learned some tools to help get the most out of your daily effort. In this section, we’ll look at ways you can put in the one-time effort today that will pay dividends in the future, like understanding the principles behind everything you learn, automating processes, building trusting relationships, and fixing problems early. These tactics will help you get more out of life without having to go the extra mile.

Learn the Principles

McKeown argues that to get the most out of the things you learn, you should aim to understand the fundamentals behind the knowledge. Understanding the fundamentals will save you time and effort in the future.

If you understand how something works, you’ll retain the information longer, and you won’t waste time relearning things over and over again. If you understand why something happened, you can apply the information to other areas of your life and more easily make connections between various subjects. A classic example of this is understanding the principles of what you’re studying rather than simply memorizing the information. Memorizing may help you pass the test, but you’ll quickly forget it, and it won’t have a lasting effect on your understanding of the world.

How to Apply Knowledge

McKeown contends that learning principles helps you more effectively use information in the future. The authors of Make It Stick give tips on how to identify the underlying principles and connect them to prior knowledge. If you struggle to identify key concepts, try looking at multiple examples or problems together and finding the common threads. Comparing and contrasting can illuminate principles that may not be obvious at first glance. For example, it may be easier to understand whether the United States is headed in the wrong direction when you look at the fall of the Roman empire.

To more easily make connections between principles, as McKeown recommends, the authors of Make It Stick provide two methods:

• When taking in new information, stop at regular intervals and ask yourself what the main takeaways are.

• Reflect on how you apply knowledge in certain situations. This may help you discover how expertise in certain areas can be applied elsewhere.

Make Things Automatic

To make things easier on yourself, McKeown recommends automating as many essential tasks in your life as possible. Automating tasks helps you avoid forgetting important things and can make the complexities of life more manageable. Write down important meetings on a calendar. Set up automatic payments for bills and other recurring payments. If a job requires you to perform a complex task, make a checklist of all the things you need to do. You have access to information, technology, and procedures to make our lives easier. Use them.

(Shortform note: In Getting Things Done, which also looks at the importance of automating tasks, David Allen gives three main reasons modern culture requires more extensive automation. First, employees are often asked to work outside of the normal eight-hour, in-office schedule. Work takes up much more space and time in people’s lives. Second, most work today is more abstract than in the industrial jobs of the past. The tasks we’re asked to complete are more numerous and less clearly defined. Third, people today are in constant communication, adding more work to our already full schedules.)

Build and Maintain Trustful Relationships

In our personal and professional lives, we rely on others. So how can we make our relationships easier to manage? McKeown’s answer to this is trust. Relationships built on trust will take much less effort than those that aren’t. In a workplace, a team that trusts each other will be much more productive. In a personal relationship, trust makes maintaining a healthy and happy bond easier. Therefore, the first thing to do is to simply surround yourself with trustworthy people. As a boss, hire people you feel you can rely on. When choosing a friend or romantic partner, prioritize trustworthiness.

Even if we try to surround ourselves with trustworthy people, there will always be times when a lack of trust arises in our relationships. McKeown argues that while people usually blame each other for a lack of trust, it’s often the structure of the relationship that’s to blame. When people have different expectations for a relationship, their goals don’t match, or their roles aren’t clearly defined, the relationship can become distrustful.

To avoid this breakdown of trust, build a strong foundation from the beginning. In our personal lives, this can just mean being open and upfront about how we feel and what we want and expect from one another. In the professional world, building a foundation of trust means clearly defining collective goals and personal responsibilities, as well as properly incentivizing employees when they meet these goals and responsibilities.

Trust Tax Versus Trust Dividends

In The Speed of Trust, business and productivity expert Stephen M.R. Covey expands on McKeown’s ideas about the importance of trust in relationships. Covey also argues that trust helps you be more efficient with less effort. One way Covey explains this is to frame relationships as paying a “trust tax” or receiving a “trust dividend.”

In low-trust relationships, we pay a “trust tax.” It will take much more time, effort, or money to confidently get the results you want when there’s little trust in a relationship. When trust is high, you receive “trust dividends” from your personal interactions. The trust you have can magnify the results of your effort. For example, when buying a used car, you’ll save a lot of time, effort, and mental energy if you buy it from a friend you trust to be honest about the car’s condition.

Get to the Core of the Issue

McKeown argues that it’s much more cost-effective to solve or prevent a problem than to contain it. No matter how small or insignificant a problem may seem, if you fix it, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and effort in the long run. Patch your leaky tire instead of adding air every week. Fix the wobbly desk rather than deal with the daily annoyance. Get in the habit of fixing issues, and you’ll make things much easier on yourself.

While fixing problems is helpful, McKeown reminds us that taking the time to prevent them can save you even more trouble. While this may seem obvious, people have trouble recognizing how the things they’re doing today might impact them in the future. McKeown advises looking for ways to prevent issues from arising. This approach can be applied to problems large and small. Live an active lifestyle and you’re much less likely to suffer health problems later in life. Put felt protectors on your furniture and you won’t damage your floor. Ask yourself: What can I do today to help myself tomorrow?

Embrace Challenges

While learning how to solve or prevent problems is a vital part of success, it is also important to realize that problems aren’t necessarily a bad thing. As Mark Manson argues in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, problems are good for you. While we tend to think of problems as something to remove from our lives, problems will always be there no matter how good we get at dealing with them. Furthermore, problems challenge us and give us an opportunity to learn and grow.

The way you look at problems can determine your level of success. If you deny your problems, you deny the reality of being a human. If you try to live a life free of challenges, you won’t grow as a person. To live a happy, productive, and effortless life, embrace challenges and strive to solve problems that give you a feeling of accomplishment.