Less is more
Less is more. A statement that has been termed cliche on multiple occasions but is still relevant to every area of our lives. Starting with the Pareto principle which states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Most of us keep complaining about how 24 hours in a day are so few that we can barely get anything done, but our social media scroll game is stronger than ever. We are taught to be busy , but are we ever taught to be productive? The number of hours we spend working on something unimportant doesn’t suddenly make it important. But on the other hand, if I were to spend less but focused time on an important task I would still find myself second guessing the quality of the work simply because I didn’t spend long hard hours to make it happen. I’ve been taught to write long answers to questions on tests because the length matters regardless of the quality and redundancy of the content. This is why the concept less is more is so powerful.
In an economy, where our attention is exchanged for currency, narrowing down your focus to things that truly matter is more important than ever before. I still don’t understand the concept of working a 9–5. What I mean is why is there such a fixed time limit to stay in office? If I could get the work done in lesser time , does that make me incompetent or does that make me better at maintaining my focus for a short period of time? Less is more is a principle you can apply to any area of life. You could go to the gym for 2 hours everyday or train each muscle separately for a short period of time and still end up with the same results. You could either have 8 hours of bad disrupting sleep or 6 hours of quality sleep. Working for lesser time doesn’t make you lazy and working for longer hours doesn’t make you a hustler or a hard worker. It all boils down to the tasks you choose to prioritize as important and focus on, that will actually get you results. This is also why minimalism is now being embedded in our culture. We don’t ‘need’ more things that will only be used one time.
Less is more, quality over quantity ,minimalism , whatever you want to call it, train your focus and set your priorities straight and 24 hours a day won’t seem few.