The process of simplifying ones lifestyle is very much a response to the increasingly complex lives that people find themselves in nowadays. When you have hundreds of emails a day, dozens of social contacts to manage and a deluge of information and entertainment to process, it’s all too easy to lose sight of what’s really important. Whether you’re finding ways of functioning more efficiently or you’re just cutting out all the excess in your life, the intention is always the same. We’re all looking for ways to cope with our complicated and hectic lifestyles.
However, the rationality behind the two approaches is quite different. When faced with an heavy workload from your boss at work, learning ways of more efficiently processing, managing, and ultimately doing it all makes a lot of sense, but it’s all merely a way of coping rather than actually dealing with the problem.
Simplifying and streamlining your life by contrast, gets right to the root issue – you have too much to do, too many things to pay attention to and too many activities stealing your focus, so identify what really matters instead. Under normal circumstances, that’s the sort of approach to a situation that I like – deal with the causes of the problem, not just the problem itself.
But the world is getting more complicated, complex and hectic. Trying to simplify our lives, as good as it might make us feel, is ultimately going against the way society is evolving (ow many people can claim the place they work hasn’t become more demanding and hectic over the last several years?). However, by pursuing it are we putting ourselves at a disadvantage? For example, if we focus on single-tasking so much, do we hinder our abilities to juggle several projects at once when the needs require it? If we focus on streamlining our lives so we don’t get so stressed and anxious, are we underdeveloping our abilities to cope with stressful situations when they do happen? What are your thoughts?
May 13, 2009 Lifestyle Design
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