I just finished reading The Art of Less Doing. This book is a small, punch-packed book about optimizing, automating and outsourcing your processes, both professional and personal. I have always found truth in books that promote productivity in order to live a better life, and this book brilliantly delivers in both spirit and actionable content.

Here are my notes:

• “If you have good habits, technology can make them better. If you have bad habits, it will intensify those habits.”
• “The 80/20 Rule fits into my concept of Less Doing, More Living because I believe that 20 percent of your effort and resources should be devoted to work, while the other 80 percent should be allocated toward rest, relaxation, and personal development. In that vein, I spend 80 percent of my time with my family, exercising, eating, reading, sleeping, or learning. Because I’ve made the choice to spend my time this way, I’m forced to figure out ways to be ultraproductive when I am working.”
• “Many times, wasted time doesn’t even relate to stress; it’s simply due to the fact that you have time to waste.”
• “The spoken word is 150,000 years old, but the written word is only 30,000 years old.”
• “”Nevertheless, our brain scans the list, it sees a series of things that it cannot yet complete, and the Zeigarnik Effect kicks in. No matter how conscientious you’ve been about prioritizing your list, the brain looks for tasks that can be completed next, which creates cognitive dissonance. It puts the brakes on your productivity, which is the opposite of optimizing.”
• “I don’t believe in priorities. To me, they are just a step above useless. I believe in finding the best time to do something.”
• “There needs to be an external factor that allows you to expand your mind in one way or another and learn new concepts.”
• “You’re not going to grow as a human being if you don’t pursue areas of interest outside of your chosen profession.”
• “Every day, each one of us has roughly a ninety-minute period of peak productivity. This peak period is when you are able to produce your best work, but it is also the time frame within which you can most easily get into a work mode.”
• “If you identify that time, respect it, and use it effectively to focus, you should be able to be two to one hundred times more effective than during any other time of the day.”
• “This also makes the question, “What would you do if you could only work one hour each day?” a reality.”
• “It’s important to recognize that when you are feeling blocked from conveying a message, you should look at the method of communication.”
• “Optimizing is about throwing out all of the excess and stress of a standard workweek and crafting your own plan instead. Finding and respecting that hour of power is one of the key ways to be the designer of your day and to keep your sanity at the same time.”
• “They have to figure out how to make a reduced schedule work—either by automating or outsourcing—in order to optimize their time. Interestingly, I’ve seen a 100 percent success rate with this exercise.”
• “Meetings should not be the place to inform anybody of anything.”
• “Meetings should be reserved for making a collaborative decision or conducting a team brainstorm.”
• “The fact of the matter is that everyone functions better with constraints. Open-ended projects have a way of never getting finished, so this reinforces the notion that we must set limits on ourselves.”
• “She says to look at everything you own as a relationship and ask yourself the following questions: Does this relationship bring me joy? Does it bring me anguish? Or does it bring me nothing?”
• “If you don’t have the constraints in place that force you to figure out solutions, you’ll just end up being lazy about it. It’s human nature.”
• “Humans have an abundance of ingenuity when it comes to innovation and invention, but they somehow lack the ability to apply the same level of ingenuity to themselves.”
• “Clutter on your phone or laptop can be just as distracting and damaging as clutter in your living room or office.”
• “The famous entrepreneurship coach, Dan Sullivan, is a proponent of this concept. He says that “double” thinking is actually very bad for the brain. For example, you will challenge your brain if you are trying to figure out how to double your annual revenue or double your market share. (…) A healthy challenge for the brain would be to figure out how to grow by ten times as opposed to two times. Thinking about growing your annual revenue by ten times forces you to stretch and reach into places you’ve never gone before.
• “Minimum limits are actually more challenging than maximum limits. It’s easier to be restrictive than it is to be expansive. For example, it’s much easier to say, “I have to turn the TV off by ten o’clock at night” (maximum limitation) than it is to say, “I will read ten pages of nonfiction every night” (minimum limitation).”
• “Minimum limitations are particularly effective when it comes to exercise. The limitation essentially allows you to create a habit. Once you create a habit and couple it with another, your rate of potential success skyrockets.”
• “Time is an easy limitation to set because everyone is strapped for it and wants more of it.”
• “I help show them that they actually have a lot more time than they think they do; they’re just not using it efficiently. By taking time away from them, they are forced to find a solution. And it works every time.
• “Money is another area that is fairly easy to control through limitation.”
• “Setting limitations in one area of your life tends to have a compounding effect in other areas as well.”
• “The solution doesn’t necessarily need to be obvious, but it has to be able to be broken down into bite-size pieces.”
• “Not only are the microgoals infinitely more achievable, but they also give us motivation to push forward. Small hinges swing big doors”
• “In my own life, some might say I have taken the concept of setting limits to an extreme. (…) I have a two-day workweek, which shakes out to be Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. I work my ass off during those hours. The schedule has forced me to give up a lot of things, which ultimately has been a good thing.”
• “Thus new opportunities for joy, relaxation, or learning can move into the space created in the absence of unnecessary activities or thoughts.”
• “This same concept applies to time and space, both physical and digital, and is the essence of optimizing.”
• “Essentially, automating means examining all of the bite-size tasks leftover after optimizing and determining what software and/or processes can be used to get them done without human interaction.”
• “When faced with a task, you need to break it down and ask yourself if this is something that you can (or should) pass off to someone else, deal with it and move on, or say no to right now.”
• “Asking yourself, “Can I say no to this?” is a very subtle shift from, “Will I or won’t I do this activity?”
• “There is a tremendous amount of freedom in delegating the task to someone else, because you get it out of your own head and off your own dreaded and ineffectual to-do list.”
• “The “deal with” category includes delegating, so even if you decide you need to get an assistant or someone else involved, you’ve still made a decision (deal by delegation), and you’re still making progress.”
• “You can handle e-mail in one of three ways: delete it, deal with it, or defer it. Once you have this strategy ingrained in your thinking, try to find other areas in your life where you can apply it.”
• “The ultimate goal of employing the decision matrix is to achieve ABD: always be done.”
• “On a subconscious level, every time we complete a task, no matter how small it is, we feel a sense of accomplishment, which inspires us to move ahead to the next task.”
• “At the beginning of the session, they sit down and map out what they are going to work on that day.”
• “If you sit down and map out your morning in a series of three simple sketches, in the order in which you will do them, you will experience a definitive mental shift.”
• “This tactic does not work with technology. You need an old-fashioned pen and a piece a paper. But it does work across languages and cultures, and it’s a practice that dates back to prehistoric cave drawings.”
• ” Research shows that we should off-load and delegate approximately 70 percent of the activities we perform year over year.”
• “Almost nothing only takes a minute, and if it does, you are probably taking yourself away from something else that you are in the middle of. There is an opportunity cost in that line of thinking. Research shows it actually takes about twenty-three minutes to get back into a flow state.”
• “We want to take full advantage of the automatic system to put the overwhelming majority of our daily tasks on autopilot.”
• “The decision matrix allows for automatic behaviors to become ingrained, thereby dramatically increasing productivity, while also eliminating decision fatigue.”
• “The closer you can get to being “done” with a task, the freer you will ultimately be.”
• “When they are adamant that no one else could possibly do what they do, I push back and ask them to explain to me exactly what it is they do. Together, we dig into the processes and the steps behind an activity. Once we look at the activity from an analytical perspective, they are able to understand they are not, in fact, the only person capable of completing those steps.”
• “Once something has become a recurring task in life, the very nature of it should be an automatic signal to start looking for ways to get rid of it!”
• “The thing to note here is that you can always look for ways of removing yourself just one more step from a process.”
• “Once you start to chain daily tasks together and automate them through a site like IFTTT.com, you can create extremely complicated processes that in some cases might add up to an entire person’s position. The hope is that the person can then focus on performing more relevant, meaningful, and rewarding tasks.”
• “All of the steps within the process are extremely low cost yet highly reputable and repeatable.”
• “I have about 120 separate processes set up in IFTTT to run on a daily basis. To be clear, that means 120 things I don’t have to do or think about.”
• “The most important benefit of setting up systems is that it gets the activity off my mind. Yes, it saves time and yes, I no longer have to actually do the task, but freeing up brain space is the highest value add from my perspective.”
• “Once something becomes a recurring task in your life, that should be an automatic signal for you to start looking for a way to get rid of it.”
• “It’s the glue of the company and handles everything from hiring and training new staff, onboarding new clients, billing, sales and marketing, and time tracking. All of those critical functions are automated through Zapier.”
• “It comes down to the question, do you want it to be good, or do you want it to be yours?
• “Identify and create a plan to off-load 70 percent of the tasks you perform daily.”
• – “When an activity becomes a habit, it becomes second nature. It’s no longer something that we think about doing, we just do it, and therefore we conserve mental energy in the execution of said activity.”
• “Multitasking, as we’ve discussed, does not exist, and it certainly does not maximize our human potential the way some employers would like to think it does. However, it is possible to “fake multitask” by combining a high-focus task with a low-focus task”
• “I truly believe that everyone on the planet has some sort of unique genius to offer. I think most people are unable to share this unique genius with the world because they don’t have enough time or there is some other restriction that is preventing them from sharing it.”
• “If everyone were able to share their unique genius, the world would be an infinitely better place.”
• “If you are trying to establish a habit, such as running every morning, there are specific physical steps you can take to increase the odds of the habit forming.”
• “The morning commute is a time period ripe for establishing productive habits.”
• “The issue, from my perspective, is that so few people actually utilize their downtime to create habits, let alone attach one to another.”
• “People tend to label certain activities as productive but wind up setting unrealistic goals for themselves.”
• “Also, very few people actually use their commute time to get a jump start on the day.”
• “Batching is essentially grouping similar tasks together so that you can avoid multitasking and focus on similar tasks all at once, even if it’s only for a brief amount of time. Fifteen-minute increments are perfectly functional.”
• “Create an open pathway in your brain to get new ideas churning and old ideas downloaded, in the spirit of utilizing the external brain.”
• “Another efficient batch activity is cooking.”
• “I’m always looking for ways to save time, and attaching habits to existing habits has been one of the most effective ways to maximize activites.”
• “I almost never schedule phone calls for longer than fifteen minutes. I view calls the same way I view meetings.”
• “Think of batching as an economy of scale. When you are doing a handful of similar tasks at the same time, you are maximizing your efficiency in that particular zone.”
• “The Pomodoro Technique is based on the idea that our brains work better in sprints than they do in marathons. The technique suggests that we work in timed, twenty-five minute intervals, with five-minute breaks in between for maximum mental output.”
• “We can apply the Pomodoro Technique to activities that some might ordinarily consider unproductive or distracting. (…) Instead of feeling guilty about it, give yourself a window.”
• “Rewards can be efficient too! It’s not efficient, however, to be constantly switching back and forth between tasks and distractions.”
• “You can play around with the ratios of work to rest, but the idea is to structure a focused sprint, followed by a brief rest.”
• “Sleep helps us to process memories (and information) properly. One of the biggest symptoms of sleep deprivation is memory loss.”
• “just nine minutes of rest after learning new information helps you to retain it longer. By rest they mean no stimuli whatsoever, just let your mind shut down and wander.”
• “what people really need is the opportunity to slow down and rest so they can process new information.”
• “We need a shift in perspective to better understand the value of distraction.”
• “the problem is we are going about being distracted inefficiently.”
• “When you eliminate sporadic behaviors and tasks and bundle the identical tasks together, ultimately you are one step closer to working (and resting) efficiently.”
• “Establish productive habits and eliminate time-consuming or useless habits.”
• “Get in the zone by batching similar tasks together.”
• “Outsourcing means referring anything that cannot be automated to a generalist or a specialist. Essentially, it is tapping into the lost art of delegation.”
• “Our generation has a tendency to think that delegating is simply telling someone else to do something (…) and not necessarily making anyone’s life more efficient.”
• delegation is the very heart of leadership. It’s when you can effectively communicate to someone what needs to be done. (…) you are empowering the person to take ownership of the task”
• “This action frees you up to perform activities that are better suited to your skill set”
• “In an ideal world, everyone gets to focus on the tasks they perform best and most efficiently.”
• “a virtual assistant is an assistant who is not in the room with you.”
• Dedicated assistant vs on-demand assistant.
• “A task is generally defined that can be completed in approximately twenty minutes.”
• “Delegating to a virtual assistant is one of the most productive activities anyone can undertake.”
• “We started without any outside funding, zero overhead, and almost no expenses.”
• “We took all all of the best practices we learned, and continue to learn, and help businesses of all sizes optimize, automate, and outsource their processes.”
• “We can literally do anything that a business needs us to do, at very low cost to them and extremely reliably. (…) We’ve never had to say “no” to a client request, which is a significant differentiator in the virtual assistant space.”
• “We have trained all of our assistants in my specific productivity methods”
• “Less Doing is essentially a hybrid of dedicated and on-demand virtual assistants. We have a core team of about sixteen assistants, all of whom are highly trained and can work with pretty much anyone who comes along. Our clients tend to work with the same assistant for several projects in a row; (…) We also have people who can jump in on any twenty-minute task that comes along, so we have a nice mixture of capabilities.”
• The virtual assistants at my company (…) wind up even further outsourcing some of the tasks that come across their desks.”
• “some people are of the mind-set that they’re the only ones dcapable of performing certain tasks. They erroneously believe their unique perspective must be stamped on virtually every task and activity within their department or company. Although grandiose, this “do-everything” mind-set is incredibly limiting.”
• “There is simply no way to grow or move forward if you are the cog in the machine that runs everything.”
• “It doesn’t make sense from any vantage point to put yourself in a position where you are 100 percent essential.”
• “There needs to be a balance between the absolutely necessary and the off-loading of nonessential tasks to achieve optimal workflow, peak output, and productivity.”
• “There is no shortage of resources out there to assist you in off-loading up to 70 percent of your daily tasks so that you can be freed up to grow as a person.”
• “If you are able to identify tasks and activities that you can off-load and outsource, it means that those tasks and activities are not essential to you.”
• “There is a better way to go about getting them done, and most of the time it’s by someone or something else.”
• “Like almost everything else in life, it takes some practice and a little bit of discipline to get there.”
• “His mind was blown. The problem was his mind-set was fixed in a limited space, and he couldn’t see the larger potential.”
• “Limited thinking is a problem I see all the time in most of the companies and organisations that I work with. People simply don’t tend to look for another, better way of doing things.”
• “Most people have a built-in resistance to the idea of hiring virtual assistants. (…) if you are someone who is resistant to this idea, ask yourself why.”
• “Overall, people are okay with asking for help, but they have a hard time assuming a leadership role, even when it comes to their own lives.”
• “Some people are of the mind-set that in order to be useful, they need to take ownership over every little thing. This behavior (…) has to do with the fact that as a society we perceive busyness as a good thing.”
• “The fact of hte matter is that it’s not cool to be busy! (…) There’s no nobility in that predicament.”
• “Delegation is a muscle that you need to exercise like any other. You must use it to create pathways in your mind and create channels to get things done.”
• “When working virtually with anyone (…) clear communication is of the utmost importance.”
• “clear communication (…) helps to speed up the process by which we get work done.”
• “We’ve discovered there are certain types of people who actually perform much better when they are away from others, working autonomously.”
• “When we can match [task-centered people] with people who are overwhelmed, magical things happen: we remove bottlenecks, we complete tasks quickly, and everyone functions within optimal work zones.”
• “When people see their “to-do” list magically shrink, the benefits of delegating start to catch on.”
• “Visualize your to-do list and an army of people working on it to get things done. The satisfaction of that visual should trigger an action – ideally delegating!”
• “Individual efficiency is at the very heart of what I strive to help people achieve.”
• “if I wanted to have this book translated into Spanish (…) I can put the entire project in the hands of a virtual assistant.” (…) Does your driveway need snowplowing? Are you searching for a specific class for your child? Do you need someone to take over the payment of your monthly bills?”
• “Some of these tasks are high touch in that they require knowing the specifics of our business or personal preferences, but some of them fall under the category of standard administrative tasks.”
• “A few of the companies (..) provide [virtual assistants] for every single one of their employees. When a company recognizes the value and utilizes VAs for personal tasks, in addition to business functions, we know they really get it. They have accepted or adopted a Google-like stance, recognizing that if people aren’t worried about picking up their dry cleaning at noon, they can focus more intently while they are at work.”
• “Once you’ve created a process that is replicable, it becomes intrinsically scalable, which means the output potential is exponential.”
• Note: scalable processes can then fulfill all the economically viable demand in a short amount of time. Really interesting.
• “Always look for ways to remove yourself from the process and exercise the delegation muscle.”
• “Outsourcing your outsourcing.” Note: something suggested by this is to hire a VA to tell you what you should hire a VA for! This might yield great results.
• “The process I lay out to combat the experience of being overwhelmed and dealing with chronic stress is to optimize, automate, and outsource.”
• “There is almost no limit to what can be outsourced. (…) when you loop a virtual assistant into the mix, the sky’s the limit.”
• “the process that I use with my podcasts has automated steps along the way and only involves human capital when absolutely necessary. We have stripped all the back and forth that typically occurs when a boss asks an employee to do something. The tasks are stacked in a way that one specific actions triggers the subsequent actions and there is zero time-consuming discussion about it.”
• “It’s like a condensed Pomodoro Technique – maximum efficiency in fixed time bursts.”
• “Productivity will reach an entire new level when you begin to outsource your outsourcing procedures. There are two ways of going about this. The first is when you are triggered to automatically bring in people (…) the second is when th additional people outsource the outsourcing.”
• “There are actually outsourcing experts these days who are completely in tune with the latest”
• “The fact of the matter is people simply don’t know what they don’t know. If you’re someone who has no clue about the technology available to make your life easier, the necessity for you to find yourself a “project manager” for life is even higher than the average person.”
• “an outsourcing expert is the way to go if you’re a newbie to the outsourcing mind-set.”
• “the new user interface is “no user interface”.”
• “”Set it and forget it” is the new normal.”
• “to be truly efficient with your time, think about the potential for optimization, automation and outsourcing from day one. That way, you are setup to grow straight out of the gate. Maximum productivity comes down to an issue of volume.”
• “Don’t start doing a podcast a week until you have thought through the logistics of how you can output seven in a week.”
• “Don’t limit your own potential by thinking in bite-size pieces of only the work that you personally can handle.”
• “If you’re facing any of the following, outsource! Research projects, social media management, ghostwriting, financial modeling, travel planning, event planning, graphic design, website creation.”
• “Certainly, you can bring in professional organizers to handle anything that might fall under the category of “life management.” This includes all of th errand-type activiteis I mentioned earlier”
• “Essentially, automation is the future. Humans will always be fallible, there’s just no way around it. (…) human realities (…) pop up to slow production. Automation makes things cheaper, more error resistant, scalable, transferable, and repeatable. An automated process is never going to get tired, or call in with the flu (…) On the flip side, you rhuman employees will also be happier because they don’t have to do that tiresome work anymore. You are basically reallocating resources so that you can utilize your people and your processes to the best of their abilities.”
• “Automation is the first and most important step in the productivity improvement process.”
• “When you have reached the point of mastering optimization, automation, and outsourcing, you are able to get back to basics, which allows you to enjoy the imple everyday tasks that you may one have eschewed.”
• “The three-tiered process of optimizing, automating, and outsourcing is designed specifically to help people feel more human.”
• “the idea is (…) to reclaim precious time and to pursue the things in life that you love, ideally with the people you love.” The process will free you up to focus on the things that you want to do”
• “Scientifically, humans are creatures of leisure. (…) we need to have time for relaxation, reflection, humor, and overall downtime. We are not created to be “on” and functioning all the time (…) The more we can maximize our downtime both in quantity and quality, the better we’ll be able to perform when we do need to be “on”.”
• “As we get older, we get further and further away from our natural state of wonder and curiosity.”
• “The end result of what I consider to be playful manifests itself as real change in my own and other people’s lives.”
• “research has proven that certain activities, such as washing the dishes, and folding laundry, are a gateway to mindfulness meditation because your mind is able to drift and recuperate when performing these tasks.”
• “enjoy all the other things that make us human: culture, love, community, service, and learning. Without these rewards, we face burnout, joylessness, and a feeling of desperation. In those circumstances, we become completely ineffective.”
• “We need to be putting so much more energy into making ourselves happy, relaxed, educated, and improved so that we can put 20 percent of white-hot-fire intensity into the work that we do. This approach is far more impactful than taking a lukewarm, mediocre stance on everything we do in our lives.”
• “At the end of the day, people basically want the same things: peace of mind, time to relax, less worry, better results from their efforts, appreciation, and less stress.”
• “There are also a good handful of people I work with who are looking for the 1 percent edge. They are highly functioning, high-net-worth individuals, but they want to perform better and still have more time to enjoy the fruits of their labor.”
• “The solution for both types of people is the same. It does require a little bit of soul searching”
• “There was a time in my own life when I was sick that I was 90 percent focused on physical fulfilment. Over time and with the growth of my family, my focus has shifted to emotional fulfilment.”
• “There’s an element of pure enjoyment built into the full-circle nature of task delegation.”
• “In some ways, productivity is born from a lack of productivity. The chaos forces us to create systems if we want to be more productive, efficient, and effective.”
• “What changes are you going to be able to make in your life and, hopefully, in the lives of the people around you?”
• “You identify a problem and then drill down into The Five Whys behind it. (…) This method, centered in factual responses, is reliably effective to find solutions to problems.”
• “You identify a problem and then drill down into The Five Whys behind it. (…) This method, centered in factual responses, is reliably effective to find solutions to problems.”
• “The very good news is it is possible to make significant change in your life without a huge amount of effort. (…) By simply being more conscientious about your time and your choices, you can free up precious time to enjoy doing the things you want to do. Ironically, in becoming more efficient, you will find beauty and value in retaining certain inefficiencies.”
• “Through education comes improvement and with improvement comes satisfaction.”
• “Less doing = more living!”