I was keen to review The Power Of Less because Leo Babauta, the author and owner of Zen Habits, started blogging about the same time as me and it’s very encouraging to see him become one of the top bloggers and now a successful author to boot. The Power Of Less provides a blueprint for what I believe personal productivity actually is (you might call it simplifying, efficiency, GTD, Zen To Done… whatever). Essentially it covers how to streamline your life by identifying the essential and eliminating the unnecessary. This is encapsulated in six key principles, including setting limits, starting small and focusing on one thing at a time.
What marks this book out is the overall tone of it. If you’re a fan of Leo’s blog, it reads very much like an expanded and polished version of one of his posts. Where David Allen spent three chapters extolling the virtues of his supposed world-changing system, Leo offers a collection of commonsense suggestions for streamlining your life that he genuinely hopes you will find useful… without any of the over-sell. And what’s better is that, for once, this is a personal-growth book that feels like it’s aimed at the average Joe who wants an easier life, not some corporate entity looking for ways to get that next promotion (despite what the subtitle of the book suggests).
Considering the book encourages you to simplify and streamline your life, it’s perhaps no surprise that it’s a simple read. This is a mixed blessing. The average self-help book takes a basic concept and tries to bloat it up for several hundred pages, but at least you get something to really think about. The discussion of the six principles takes up less than a third of the book. The rest covers how to apply them to such things as time management, your workspace, your daily routine, etc. This marks it out from the rest because not enough authors provide clear, practical examples of their philosophies in action. However, how you streamline your emails pretty much follows the same approach as how you’d streamline your filing or your commitments, so you’ll probably get the whole idea of the book early on.
If you’re a regular reader of Zen Habits, there is nothing particularly fresh here and how much you enjoy this book may depend largely on how much you enjoy that blog (considering how popular it is, that’s probably not an issue). Perhaps much of the advice is kind of obvious – if you’re a regular reader of Organize IT or similar blogs you’ve probably touched on it before – but you’d be surprised at how many people are blind to it. The Power Of Less is an easy-going introduction to streamlining your life, and you will certainly struggle to find such advice presented as concisely and simply as in this book.
March 9, 2009 News & Updates
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