How to Simplify Your Life | Slow Living

There is no one right way to live. But many people today are looking for something else. Something different. When you ask people what's important in their lives, they might say something like, oh, spending time with my family, or having my health as long as possible, or maybe making a positive impact on the world, or continually learning and growing as long as I can, or some other version of a similar thing. And often you will see how these people spend their time, talents, and attention is in no way related to the things they just said were the most important to them. Now certainly this wouldn't be you or me, right? Right? If you've been around here for any amount of time, you've heard me talk about core values. Core values basically answers the question, what is most important to you in life? And I believe for most of us, there is some cognitive dissonance between our reality and what we say is important to us, our core values. Now I would argue that this is a big problem. In fact, it's a big nuanced problem with so many possible answers to it. Today I would like to propose one possible answer to that, and that is to simplify your life. The idea with simplifying your life is that you can focus your time, attention, and finances on the things that are actually deeply meaningful to you rather than just being spread too thin in all categories. I started my journey of simplifying my life over 10 years ago. And today I'd like to share a comprehensive guide to simplifying your life. That absolutely means she's having like the best day of her life right now. Number one, find your core values. I have a video about it, it's down in the description. I'll also link a few other helpful resources down there as well for doing this exercise. Number two, identify your shoulds. Remember when you were a teenager and there was this thing of pure pressure? I think your shoulds are like the grown-up version of that. These are all the things in life that we've been told by society that we should do. Basically, this is adopting others' values based on what we are consuming or surrounded with. Just because something was valuable to maybe your parents or guardians doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be important to you. The same with the culture at large. It's not that others are wrong for valuing these things or anything like that. It's just the idea that you are an individual with your own values and beliefs, some of which you've gathered from other people, others which you've just developed on your own as a person. Now, there's nothing wrong with adopting other people's values. It's just that we need to consider if this is actually important to us or if it's something that we've been told we should value. Take five minutes and answer this question. What are the actions, desires, and beliefs I've adopted that don't align with my personal core values? Every time I do this exercise, I'm always amazed how many things I can still come up with. I've done this exercise many times over the last several years. Number three, survey your commitments. In the grand scheme of things, very few of our decisions, behaviors, or activities are necessarily permanent, nor in most cases do things just happen to us. In the vast majority of cases, we make a conscious decision to further complicate our lives. Over the past ten years of simplifying my life, I've found that many of the behaviors we take for granted often further and further complicate our lives until we're just walking bundles of overcommitted anxiety. If we simplified our lives just for the sake of simplifying our lives, we would be totally missing the point. The point is to simplify our lives in order to give us space to pursue the things that are the most important to us. I'd like to share a few things that I've committed to over time that have added significant complication to my life, but have been worthwhile in pursuing. We have a dog. This is Charlie. She's a seven-year-old golden retriever and a licensed therapy dog. Now she's complicated our lives a little bit, but dogs are incredibly important to my wife, Abby. Making the world a better place is one of her main core values, and she's chosen to live that out by helping dogs who've been abused find new homes that are safe and secure. Now this activity in particular complicates our lives quite a bit, as you can imagine, and so there are certain situations where we've had to say no, but to this point we've had more than 10, we're just kind of losing count at this point, dogs in our house that have come from all sorts of different backgrounds that, with the help of Charlie, our dog, we've been able to reintegrate and show what normal is and get them into homes. Sometimes we have these dogs for just a few weeks, other times it's been up to six months. So if you see multiple dogs in the background of one of my videos, that's probably what we're doing. I run a business. Running a business is so much more complicated than just working a job. I have done both, and I've done both at the same time. And it does really complicate your life. You have more control, but it's much more complicated. I run a YouTube channel. This YouTube channel. Over the last year, this has taken at least 25 hours of every single week of my life to do. The key with each of these things is that they align with our values. They add more value than the amount of complication they take, if that makes sense. Clearly, these particular things probably don't align with your values, but that's up to you to find the things that do, and to make conscious decisions on whether something is more complicated than it's worth. So take a minute to write down each of your commitments. This is not just time commitments, but also energy and money. You can be as broad or precise with this as you want. I'm going to be precise, and you can generalize as much as you'd like. Time. Now, if you want to go really deep, like I am, you can actually do a time analysis for an entire week. Basically, that's keeping track of your life in 15-minute increments for an entire week. This will be very informative on how you're actually spending your time. At the end of the process, hold up each thing that you wrote down and compare it to your values. Does how you spent your time align with your values? If not, then why are you spending your time on it? For example, I might see after my time analysis that I scrolled for 8 hours that week, and after about 1 second of consideration, I realize that that in no way aligns with my values. Maybe I can replace it with something that does align with my values. But often, scrolling is used as a transitionary activity or as a relaxation activity. I don't know about you, but I do not find scrolling in and of itself to be restful at all. So I might consider replacing it with another transitionary type activity or something that I also enjoy that is restful. Also, perfection in this is not the answer. It's not sustainable in the long term. But just making sure you're going in the right direction, that's pretty important because that helps you live the life that you want to live. And ultimately, that's what this whole self-improvement thing is about. While I'm getting nerdy, I might rate how much each allocation of time aligned with my values. From a scale of negative 2 to plus 2, plus 2 being this fully aligns with my values, I should do more of this, this is amazing, to negative 2, this is basically destroying my values. It's the opposite of what I want to be doing with my time. Next is energy. Basically, anything we do in life has some sort of energy expenditure. That could be physical energy, literally calories burned. That could be social energy, that could be focus, attention, all of those things. What I've noticed is that some activities are additionally draining on top of the amount of actual effort that you need to put in, and others are kind of energizing. I'll give a couple examples to help illustrate this. I was supposed to be on a film shoot today, but the project ended up getting canceled late last night because the subject of the video had a family emergency. I hope everything's okay there. But we were all kind of bummed because we'd spent all afternoon prepping the studio space, and so then I had to go in this morning and tear down all of the equipment rather than actually getting to do the production and knowing I'll have to do that all over again. I would say that was like a negative 1 on a scale of plus 2 to negative 2 on the energy scale. Right next door to the studio, another YouTuber has his office. I've known this guy for a while, but we haven't had much of a chance to talk shop. He showed up and he was excited to talk shop, and so then I, once I finished wrapping up, went over and had a 30-minute chat with him. It was amazing because I don't get to interface with other YouTubers. I walked away from that conversation after like half an hour, I was like a plus 2 on the energy scale. It was amazing. It actually took that whole experience and made it a positive energy experience, and that gave me like the boost and the energy to get through the day. So now next to your commitments, I would go ahead and give each one of those an energy rating from plus 2 being a really positive energy experience to a negative 2 being a real drain on your energy. While you are doing this, take a minute and consider that many of the things that are an energy boost or an energy drain on you might not be on your calendar. So you might see work as a whole, but then if you think about it, it's like 80% of work is like a plus 1 or maybe a 0, but then there's like one project or one coworker or something like that. That's like, that's what the actual problem is. That's maybe only 10% of work. So going out of your way to maybe note those things can be really helpful in identifying what is actually draining your energy. It's not work, it's just the one project. Next is money. The big question we're trying to ask here is, is the value we're getting for the money going out greater than that amount that's going out? Now we certainly all don't have control over all of our money, but there's a pretty good chance that we can make some decisions that will affect some of our money at least. This can be on a macro or a micro scale. In a practical sense, here is how I have just actually gone through this process. I go through my entire bank statement for the last month, every single transaction and rate on a scale of plus 2 to negative 2. If I got positive, it's more value than I spent. If it's a negative, it's less value than I spent. Clearly this doesn't work perfectly for everything. It's like, well, if I want electricity in my house, I guess I have to pay my energy bill. Okay. I need some water. So at this point, we've done a lot of observation and planning, and at this point it's time to implement. Now, I can't tell you how to implement. That is a highly personal thing because the different things you may implement are so vastly different depending on your personal values. But what I can do is share some things that I've personally implemented into my life over the years that have been very helpful for me. Now, obviously this is a dynamic list. It will change over time. It has changed over time. Two years ago, this looked very different. In two years from now, it will look different, but this is at least a snapshot of some of the things I'm doing right now in my life. I live a minimalist lifestyle in regard to my possessions. I live within my means financially, and I only spend discretionarily on things and experiences that give me more value than the money I spent on them. I quit chasing happiness. Happiness is a temporary feeling. Instead, I've chosen to pursue joy, which is an inward sense of well-being that cannot be shaken. To me, this is a much more worthwhile pursuit. I quit keeping up with the news. I have absolutely no control over any of the situations I hear about, and so why would I keep filling my brain with that? If something is important enough, I will inevitably hear about it. I'm extremely picky about who I spend my time with. There's this old saying that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and I believe that is very true. I also believe this is true based on the content you consume, and so I keep my circle small online as well because all of these influences are affecting who I am as a person, and I want to make sure those are people that I want to be like. Avoiding trends of all kinds. Now, this could be in many different areas, but generally I find that trends are a suck on your time, money, and attention, and most of the time they're not worth it. Trends by nature will come and go. Now, clearly there is nothing wrong with trends, but I've just personally chosen to stop pursuing trends because they're just not worth the attention. I only eat foods that make me feel good, so we eat a diet of mostly whole foods. I have no particular dietary restrictions for myself, and I eat out like maybe once a month, and I make sure I pair that with a social interaction. Another thing is enjoying the process. I believe if life isn't worth it right now when you're in the trenches working towards what you're working towards, then what's even the point? This is difficult for me because two of my top three core values personally are competence and achievement, and as an achievement-based person, I'm always looking towards the next goal, the next thing, and it's very hard for me to be present and actually enjoying right now. So this has been very transformative for me, especially because I don't think I will ever truly feel like I have arrived wherever that is. Technology. I've found that the less time I spend on technology, the better I feel, and so limiting my use of it outside of work has been huge, especially at this time of year once the weather's getting nice. The moment I'm done with work, I want nothing to do with technology. I want to be outside enjoying the beautiful weather that we only get for a few months of the year. If you're at a spot in your life right now where you are not happy with where you're at, I would encourage you to stop before you go on to the next video and do something from this video. Doesn't have to be the whole thing, but do something because what's the point of watching videos about living a better life if you're not going to take any kind of action on it? I'd like to leave you with a quote. Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. Confucius.