Are You an Essentialist?

Shaping a Data Team

I work with a lot of exhausted people. They consistently show up to meetings five minutes late and let everyone know they have a “hard stop” at the top of the hour. Most of their thinking time comes in the evening, on the sofa, in front of the TV, laptop in hand.

I’ve lived that life; manic busyness consumes you like a treadmill without an off switch, and your best hope in the rat race is to get a small piece of cheese at the end. You successfully close one financial period only to wake up the next morning and start another.

Will it ever end? Will anyone remember the work you did?

Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, wants you to stop pretending these obvious questions don’t haunt you. He wants to help you focus on what matters most by embracing a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where your highest contribution lies. It’s not a process you undertake once a year, once a month, or even once a week, like organizing your closet.

Essentialism is about creating a system for handling the closet of your life.

Here’s a quick test to see if you’re an Essentialist. When you see all your opportunities, do you recognize that there’s no way you can do everything, then sort through the options and consider the unstated trade-offs behind each one? Or do you constantly overestimate your own capacity and prioritize almost everything?

The Tyranny of FOMO

How do you separate your overwhelming number of non-essential projects and responsibilities from the vital few?

If you’re an Essentialist, you take time to sort through the value of things. You don’t just drift into overcommitments; instead, you ask yourself if the work in front of you is something you should pursue. If the answer isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a no. This helps you make decisions at every level, like which emails require your response and which job you should take.

“Essentialists spend as much time as possible exploring, listening, debating, questioning, and thinking. Intentional practices, like escape, research, play, sleep, and ruthless ranking help them filter out the essential focus,” McKeown writes.

Don’t let your fear of missing out lead you down a road of regrets, he says.

Addition By Subtraction

When you embrace this mindset, you see how most of the things you own and do tie you down.

My own book editors taught me this. Editors compact your writing into shorter, more powerful messages by stripping out the fluff; the story you’re writing becomes much more powerful when it’s reduced to its essential message. The same is true of your data solutions. Untangling a web of business logic can be really hard, and the willingness to scrap overly complex code usually sets good data engineers apart from the rest.

McKeown explains, “When they have sufficient levels of clarity, [essentialists] are capable of greater breakthroughs and innovations—greater than people even realize they ought to have—in those areas that are truly vital.”

Letting Go

Talk to someone who lost it all at the peak of their career success, and you might find an Essentialist. They spend more time enjoying work for its own sake, rather than for what it gets them. Most data leaders I know can’t appreciate the beauty of data like this; they continually overpromise and underdeliver. Their real problem is that they don’t exercise their freedom of choice.

“The ability to choose cannot be taken away or even given away—it can only be forgotten,” says McKeown.

He’s right, but do you really have the freedom to choose freedom? The Essentialist life sounds great as business advice, but we don’t naturally let go of things, especially the recognition and rewards of work. We hold on to them with all our might. Change usually starts with loss, not a choice; that’s why many people who suffer sudden and severe loss often become different people. They appreciate the present, listen better, and value people more than achievement.

Are you an Essentialist? Try letting go of a few things, you’ll find out pretty quickly. Greg McKeown can help you with that.

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To remind you of this week’s data concept, enjoy More Than This, by Roxy Music from the Frictionless Data Spotify playlist.