Anyone else guilty of over-complicating tasks? Or maybe it’s just me. The idea to simplify was not really in my vocabulary before. I shifted a lot within my life and my mindset this year, but one thing I’ve been noticing about myself lately is my perception of “completeness” or “doneness.” For example, if I wanted to write a blog post, I wanted it to be complex, long, overly informative and exciting. These elements were what defined a “complete” blog post for me. This was because I pressured myself to ensure it was worth your time as a reader.
Then I realized, not everyone wants to read a 10-minute long blog post about one particular thing. A post doesn’t need to have an abundant amount of detail that people don’t care about (that type of information does have a place sometimes though) in order to be worth reading. In fact, the majority of people only prefer reading a 3-4 minute post.
Because I pressured myself to ensure my posts were worth your time as a reader by aiming for way-too-detailed and long posts, I ended up doing the opposite (driving y’all away), and hurting myself in the process – hello, >100 blog drafts in my dashboard with zero consistency. Sorry about that!
Simplify Life
This is relatable to so much in life. I over-complicate by overthinking details and need to start simplifying instead. Let’s do it together! Here are some ideas I thought of to simplify our lives – please let me know what I’m missing!
- First, get outside. I promise, just being outside creates a simple and calming feeling: take a nice walk or hike, take time to meditate and for gratitude, breathe fresh air, camp next to a calm river in a hammock, or whatever outside activity that you love that doesn’t add a huge workload to your day.
- Define in your mind the words “complete” and “done.” Once defined, you’ll learn how quickly you can accomplish certain tasks or milestones. The definitions may change depending on the task, and that’s encouraged!
- Determine what is “good enough” in the task you’re working on, and only go beyond that if you have the capacity for it. This doesn’t mean to lessen the quality, but instead keep the quality of work but trim off excess tasks where possible.
- Clean up your communication style. This is a huge and difficult task for me personally, and I’m finding it to be messy and clunky to get right. I’m SO WORDY, it’s really annoying. And as a chronic over-sharer, simplifying and shortening my verbal and written communications has been challenging, but already helpful and rewarding!
- Make a daily list (physical, digital, or imaginary) and prioritize 1-2 items on it for the day. But only do this if you have a “zero day” and aren’t busy with other things like being with people or working. The idea here is to be productive but relaxed and simple, not to add anything unnecessary to your likely already busy day.
- Unsubscribe and declutter from things that don’t bring you joy: emails, TV, doomscrolling, people, places.
- Always. Be. Reflecting. I’ve been doing this for a few years now, so it’s truly subconscious to me at this point, but after every single task, meeting, event, hang out, trip, movement, and tiny little thing, I think to myself: “What could change for this to be done more efficiently next time?” I’m guessing it’s borderline annoying for others, but it really does help with efficiency and simplification! And it’s just a part of who I am now
We may live a complex and ever-moving lifestyle, but that doesn’t mean the details of it have to be complex and stressful (in fact, I’m actually not stressed most of the time)! I also know not everyone lives the same way, and that is wonderful, so I know not all of these suggestions may be relevant.
So what would you add to this list?
What has already helped you simplify your life a little more?
P.S. This post is part of the 2023 Blogmas series. Check out the other posts here.