“What if this could be easy?”

As a lazy person, Greg McKeown’s new book, Effortless, had me at the title. 

McKeown’s previous book was the bestseller Essentialism. The origin of this one was his realization that, even after you’ve cut everything that is nonessential from your life, things can still feel off. 

One reaches an effortless state when they’re focused on activities that are both essential and enjoyable. Ultimately, this is about how it all feels. 

McKeown writes: “When you return to your Effortless State, you feel lighter, in the two senses of the word. First, you feel less heavy—unburdened. You aren’t as weighed down. Suddenly you have more energy. But lighter also means more full of light. When you remove the burdens in your heart and the distractions in your mind, you are able to see more clearly. You can discern the right action and light the right path.”

Helpfully, McKeown highlights some useful tactics for accomplishing that state. My favorite of these is the “Done for the Day” List. 

“A Done for the Day list is not a list of everything we theoretically could do today, or a list of everything we would love to get done. [...] Instead, this is a list of what will constitute meaningful and essential progress. [...] Ask yourself, ‘If I complete everything on this list, will it leave me feeling satisfied by the end of the day?’”

Of course, you only reap the benefits by being done for your day when your Done for the Day list is complete.

A close second favorite is the tactic of asking: “What is a problem that irritates me repeatedly? What is the total cost of managing that over several years? What is the next step I can take immediately, in a few minutes, to move toward solving it?”

(I imagine that exercise starting as an Airing of Grievances.)

The reason those questions are important is that we often tolerate minor annoyances because, in the moment, it takes more effort to fix them than to work around them. It’s easier to hit delete than to unsubscribe from the marketing email. It seems easier to passive aggressively say Yes to a request than to have a tough conversation with a colleague. 

But by not fixing the problems immediately, we’re really saying that it’s OK for our lives to contain these annoyances forever. That’s definitely not effortless. 

And this gets to the thing I found most interesting about the book: the idea that it’s our own mindset that can make our lives more difficult. 

McKeown writes: “When we feel overwhelmed, it may not be because the situation is inherently overwhelming. It may be because we are overcomplicating something in our own heads. Asking the question ‘What if this could be easy?’ is a way to reset our thinking. It may seem almost impossibly simple. And that’s exactly why it works.” 

To the easy path!