Thanks for your awesome blog – I’ve learned a ton since I started reading it!

I get where Leo is coming from though and if I was working in another role I would definitely be tempted to only check email two times a day.

My main distraction is Internet News Addiction. I’m getting better though, since I started blogging I’m not so inclined to go from news web site to news web site.

I have a well-paying job, a caring wife, a beutiful 16mo old daughtor, and everything I could possibly need to be happy, and yet at times I still “want”. Mostly I “want” a bigger house in a more desirable part of town, but I also “want” to spend more time skiing, “want” to have more time to work on my hobbies, “want” to go on more, longer, and better vacations…

It’s not just as simple as saying “I’m done wanting, its time to be happy with what I have.”

My second simplifying strategy is shopping at Costco. We just went for a new TV. My husband had done a lot of basic research and then we relied on Costco, knowing that their market research is a lot more sophisticated than ours and that any affordable option TV in the size he wanted was already vetted. The purchase took 10 minutes. In a big electronics store or online with a gazillion viable options, you spend way too much time on insignificant decisions.
This is backed up by research in Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice.

On the downside, I don’t find it to often address concern for others besides self, or the building of real character, above and beyond seeking an easier, more pleasant life. For me, those are big things to overlook.

As for the specific number of times you check email … it’s not as important as setting limits and times to check email (instead of being inside your inbox all the time). You really have to find the limits that work best for you, as you’ll see in the book.

Regardless, I’m planning on changing some habits to improve my life. Looking forward to reading the book.

However … many, many office workers (including myself) have put this into practice with great benefit. It depends on the job, of course, but often you’ll find that you don’t really need to check email as much as you think you do.

And more importantly, you learn that if you wean yourself from email, you can get more important stuff done. It’s amazing how much you can get done if you learn to focus and block out distractions like email.

“I work in the business of having clients, and my clients are the fuel to my business. So, it’s very difficult for me to do this, but at the same time, my attachment to my inbox kills me.”

I definitely hear you — most of us feel this need to check email and respond quickly, as we feel our jobs depend on it.

But do you think your clients/co-workers can’t wait half a day or a day for a response? That’s rarely the case — when we send emails to most people, we don’t expect an instant reply.

I’ve been emailing some top bloggers recently, for example, and sometimes they don’t get back to me for a few days or even a week … and that’s OK with me, because I know they’re busy and respect their time.

So I think it’s first important to recognize that most people don’t expect us to respond instantly … and for those who do, we need to provide them with a phone number or other way of getting in touch asap.

Once we realize that we don’t need to respond right away, that we can wait half a day or a day (or even two or three sometimes), we can be liberated from our attachment to email. I know how difficult this can be, believe me.

It takes a certain amount of effort to build things (or grow them or cook them or write them, or whatever). If we want nicer things than we had before, it stands to reason that we’ll have to invest more time to create them than we used to. This costs us leisure time, and at some point we hit a limit. We can either sacrifice the quality of our work, and therefore the efficiency of our homes, the safety of our cars, the taste of our food, the quality of our health care, and the entertainment from our writing…

OR:

We can work more efficiently. We can have better things, and keep our leisure time, or even increase it. Improving efficiency is the key to this and it’s the only way we’ll end up with shorter workweeks, short of sacrificing our quality of life.

It’s not really on-topic as far as the book review goes, but Thomas brought it up and I think it’s interesting.

Number 1 states: Set limitations. By setting limitations, we must chose the essential. But this is principle 2, Choose the essential. And by choosing the essential, one automatically eliminates the nonessential, which is principle 3 or simplify.

Wouldn’t it be easier to wrap all that into one? Simply limit to essentials. I understand the need to break things down but based on principle number 3 of simplify, I think it can all be reduced to 1 main principle. Hope that makes sense.

Mark

Suggestions?

I’ll read this book … I’m also curious about Ali Velshi’s new book, Gimme My Money Back. (Different topic, of course, but if we’re talking books today …)

Thinking back on my misspent youth in the Cretaceous, I’d venture a guess that it’s not that we’re taking in more information, but that we’re exposed to different kinds of information in different ways.

Consider a hunter-gatherer in the woods or on the plains. The amount of information coming in to this individual is vast: the weather; the direction of the wind; the sounds and scents on the wind; the season, the altitude; the degree of sun, shade, & moisture; the positions of the sun, moon, and stars; the availability and location of drinkable water; the presence of other humans; the presence and habits of other predators; the presence and habits of grazing animals; the behavior of scavengers…and on and on. It’s a phenomenal amount of information, and the person needs to know how to handle that information with a high degree of sophistication and accuracy — just to survive. All of these elements are present in the hunter-gatherer’s daily life, and they all bear on his or her task of obtaining food and materials for building and maintaining living structures.

While today it seems as though young people and adults are blitzed with information — and static — pouring in from all directions, it seems that way because the information is louder and the static more intrusive. Rather than an irrelevant snap of a branch or unexpected shift of a breeze, the static comes to us as advertising delivered at high volume or the noise of a helicopter roaring overhead. It’s not more information; it’s just louder information.

Ditto the difference between life in the 1950s and life at the turn of the 21st century. We spent just much time gathering information: we read. I read all the time, and so did most of the people I knew. We got two newspapers a day,and we read them. When we weren’t reading, we were listening to the radio (we didn’t have TV where I lived), which was full of real information and real entertainment. Most radio stations were comparable to today’s NPR stations, only on steroids. We wrote and read letters. We talked on the phone. Life was quieter because the static was quieter: we didn’t have jet airplane or helicopter noise in the background every time we went outdoors (you know, the sky is not supposed to roar, unless a storm is in progress…). But the data stream was still there, in the form of print and handwritten material, advertising, radio programs, telephones, people talking, children hollering, dogs barking, cats yowling, birds singing, cars backfiring, mules braying…you name it.

My point is that quieter information is not less information. We live in a very noisy world…technology has turned up the volume on information. It’s more in your face, but it’s not necessarily more.

I’d like to make an offer to your frugal readers … buy The Power of Less and I will give you one of three bonuses:

1. The Zen To Done ebook, usually a price of $9.50.
2. The Zen Habits Handbook for Life ebook, usually a price of $6.50.
3. An exclusive audio podcast of weight loss tips from me, packaged with a special audio interview — me interviewing GTD author David Allen.

Just send an email to zenhabits [at] gmail with the words “bonus giveaway” in the subject line and your order number, along with which of the three bonuses you’d like.

Sorry to throw this out there on your site, J.D. — I hope you don’t mind. I just thought your readers would appreciate a little extra value for their purchase.

Thanks everyone! Also check out my new audio interview with Merlin Mann of 43 Folders on Zen Habits today.

Nice review of the book. I too like facts and figures so I see where you are coming from.

I haven’t read the book myself, but I will wait until I’m either able to get it through the library or paperbackswap. If I REALLY like the book, I’ll then look into purchasing it. I’m frugal and that’s the way “I roll”.

Thanks for your insight on the book!
Cheers!
-HIB

This is also the sub-title of Paradox of Choice – why more is less. So less is more, right? This is also touched on well in Kessler’s It’s Not About the Money, though not with the steps that you list here.

Hmm. That is a weird review – on one hand, I feel like you’re disappointed with the book, but on the other I think the individual parts were good and helpful for you. Many of the wealthier and more successful people I meet read or go to seminars with the attitude that “if I can find one new implementable idea, it will all be worth it.”

With so many steps you’re adding, wasn’t it worth it?