In a sea of goals, habits, and tasks, how do we decipher what matters most? When we’re drowning in options, how do we choose where to start?
One of my favorite approaches is to cut my possibilities in half.
When you have a lot of agenda items to discuss in the next sixty minutes, act as if the meeting were only thirty minutes.
If you aren’t sure how to spend the next eight hours, imagine you only had four.
When you can’t decide what to pack for a trip, imagine your luggage allotment was half the size.
Given that time or space permits, you can choose to continue to go over agenda items, work through the next four hours, or pack more things into your bag. By cutting in half, we identify what’s most important.
This option sounds reckless, extreme, and illogical. If we’re already crammed, why would we add more pressure to ourselves?
This extreme reveals a helpful truth; we can’t get to everything. To spend our resources in a meaningful way, we must figure out what matters most. When we cut our options in half, we must choose what matters most right now.
If each day was only twelve hours, how would you spend them?
If your lifespan was cut in half, what would you do differently?
This exercise doesn’t work in every scenario. You wouldn’t want to cut your directions in half and not know where you’re going. Nor would you want to cut every sentence in half and lose their meaning.
No single solution will be applicable in every scenario, but it probably works for about half of them. Apply this principle where it works and cut out the rest ruthlessly.
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