Top tips: How to be an essentialist at work

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and share ways to stay ahead. This week, let's look at a few ways you can become an essentialist at work.

It's easy to fill up our calendar with tasks that may not be impactful, but we end up feeling falsely accomplished. This happens to us more often than we realize, and the antidote to this is to be an essentialist.

What does it mean to be an essentialist?

It's the pursuit of less.

But you may be thinking, "How does this apply to work? Won't my manager be upset?" 

Let me clear it up for you. Being an essentialist means that instead of glorifying the practice of adding a lot of tasks to our day and feeling exhausted, we should include only those that highly benefit us.

The internet has influenced us to be maximalists in everything. Having one is never enough, we need more when it comes to things. This influence has trickled down to all areas of our life, to the point where essentialism is absent.

At your job, this is a problem. You can work on a document that's due in three months, but ignore handling the course that's due next week. When this happens, you might feel like you've accomplished a lot because you have dedicated yourself to a project throughout the day, but you didn't work on something that would be more impactful. 

To be an essentialist at work, you need to keep a few things in mind, and I'm going to go over them in this blog. Buckle up.

1. Don't prioritize everything.

This is a mistake I make all the time. If you took a look at my to-do list, you'd find 20 tasks, with 10 of them marked as "high priority." Out of those 10, I'll probably complete five and, you guessed it, they'll somehow be the least important ones. If you're anything like me, there's still hope for us.

The best thing to do is to think like an essentialist. Use the ABC method. When you prioritize your tasks, mark only three high-priority tasks from A to C. That means you should complete the A, B, and C tasks before you work on the other tasks. This method helps segregate the essential, high-impact tasks from the rest of your list.

You know what Warren Buffett's former pilot, Mike Flint, said? Warren Buffett apparently advised him to focus on his top five priorities and treat the remaining twenty as an "avoid-at-all-costs" list.

But let's not be too harsh. We cannot take the top five tasks and dump the rest. I'll realistically reframe it here.

Take your top three tasks and don't move on to the other tasks before you complete them. It's as simple as that. This will ensure you kick off the highest priority tasks from your list every workday.

2. Don't let the size of the task fool you.

I have this tendency to think less of a task just because it's a small one. My mind goes, "Oh, it's just a phone call. I can do it later." And then, almost on cue, my boss shows up asking about that exact same call I decided to put off.

Something could be a simple task but also an impactful one. Yet you might put it on the back burner, assuming it's simple and you can be done anytime. But no, you have to prioritize it and work on it immediately because, first of all, it's a small task, and second, it's highly impactful. With 20% of your effort, you'd get 80% of the impact, and that's something an essentialist would do.

An essentialist wouldn't choose a task with 80% effort and 20% gain over one with 20% effort and 80% gain. You have to choose the essential, easy-to-complete task from your list that delivers the maximum impact.

Realistically, if you keep pushing back an easy-to-do but impactful task, your boss would also question your decision-making skills. Their mind would immediately go to, This task is so easy to do. Why hasn't this person finished it yet? High-impact tasks are also the tasks that give you high visibility.

A final word

Essentialism is a broad concept that can be applied to many areas of your life. If you can become an essentialist in other areas of your life, you'll be liberated from the limitations of society. When it comes to work, it can catapult your productivity and your work-life satisfaction. It will help you create meaningful impact through your own satisfaction while also showing your supervisors that you know how to prioritize and focus on vital objectives rather than simply staying busy with tasks.