The Art of Achieving More by Doing Less

There is an ancient philosophy called Wei Wu Wei and this is generally defined as "achieving without forcing" or "effortless action".

I now want to apply it to some practical elements of work life and so we can now learn how to apply Wu Wei to "achieving more by doing less". Who would not want to learn about this? Apart from doing our Workshop called "The Productive Executive" this article will be the next best option.

So let us begin at the beginning. We can start at either end -either from the Doing Less perspective or the Achieving More perspective but let us decide to begin with Doing Less.

We all want to do less right? So how do we fill up our workday at the moment? I have had the great fortune to speak with hundreds of people over the last few years and hear a litany of very common issues with all of them. "Too many meetings, too many emails, too much demand on my time, never getting a chance to do my own work, taking work home, coming to the office at weekends, etc and etc"

Humans have a great capacity to not only grow work but also to lose perspective of their roles and the important outcomes upon which they will be judged. What happens of course to many of us is that we feel a decreasing sense of fulfillment in the workplace and mostly this is caused by all these obstacles to achieving our goals.

Most people live in a Re-active World and so we need to examine ourselves and our roles and our key job functions to determine ways in which we can become more Pro-active.

This is now a simple introductory check list to "Doing Less"

Review your workplace objectives

Review your KPIs

Prioritise the elements of those KPIs

Calculate the number of hours you need to devote to achieving those objectives each week

Be very diligent and determined to follow those designated hours and achieving those objectives

Allocate those times into your Calendar at the start of each week

Discipline yourself to follow your plan

Eliminate all emails that do not relate to your specific goals or KPIs

Reduce the number of times each day that you look at your inbox

Minimise the number of meetings you have each week and limit the time of the meetings-any meeting that goes longer than 30 minutes will become unproductive and time wasting

Essentially you are creating a Time/Work Schedule and now you need to be strong minded and develop self discipline

Remove everything from your workplace area that does not assist you in achieving the above

Then your mind will be free to focus on the "things that matter"

If you have success in this aspect then you will experience fulfillment-you will have banished the unproductive time wasting parts of your job.

When we are overwhelmed and we become busy we are creating a very unproductive energy around us. Our mind is stressed and even the simplest things will take longer. In many ways we become stifled within ourselves. The simplest things take longer to achieve. We procrastinate and we can often lose our way. We become tired and then overtired and in consequence we become unfulfilled.

But conversely when we are in command of our work and in command of our mind and our direction and our energy then it is different. We can then see that we are in fact Achieving More by Doing Less. We have stopped doing the things that block us from our fulfillment. Essentially we are being Pro-active and no longer Re-active. We are moving from being mastered by our work to mastering our work and from this we can then apply the same principals to our life and in time become the master of our life and of our circumstances and not being mastered by those circumstances.

Many years ago I had the pleasure to watch some great International Professional golfers and I was intrigues to see how they played this difficult game in a vastly different way to the amateurs. The amateur player puts all they have into hitting the golf ball. They attack it with full force and energy-a furious launch at the golf gall with their body driving every aspect of their speed and determination. When I observed the Professionals it was different-they were very slow in the golf swing-they were minimalist in effort and action. It seemed for them that the World and time had slowed down. Consequently they drove the ball longer and straighter. They were achieving more with less.

When we can apply this way to our work and then to our life we too can see how we can achieve more with less.

When we do this then we have arrived -- we are in "Wei Wu Wei".