Speaker 1: If you work in a big organization or even a
Speaker 1: small one, you've probably heard someone say we need to
Speaker 1: work smarter, not harder. Well, that sounds good in theory,
Speaker 1: but how do you actually do that in practice. Greg
Speaker 1: McEwan is the New York Times bestselling author of Essentialism
Speaker 1: and Effortless and has thought a lot about the way
Speaker 1: that he works and how he can make it simpler, easier,
Speaker 1: and more fun. So how does Greg actually simplify his
Speaker 1: work and what does it mean to really streamline a
Speaker 1: process or a workflow? And the next time someone says
Speaker 1: to you that you need to work smarter and not harder,
Speaker 1: what should you actually change. My name is doctor Amantha Imber.
Speaker 1: I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science
Speaker 1: consultancy invent Him. And this is how I work, a
Speaker 1: show about how to help you do your best work.
Speaker 1: On today is my favorite Tip episode? Will you go
Speaker 1: back to an interview from the past and I pick
Speaker 1: out my favorite tip from that interview. In today's show,
Speaker 1: I speak with Greg mceew and we start by talking
Speaker 1: about an idea that Greg wrote about in Effortless that
Speaker 1: he refers to as the minimum steps required for completion
Speaker 1: and I was keen to hear about how Greg has
Speaker 1: applied this idea in his own life.
Speaker 2: Just to set that up just for a second. There's
Speaker 2: all sorts of examples of this in business. But I
Speaker 2: interviewed Mike Evangelist who as that's his real name, but
Speaker 2: he worked at a DVD burning company, and this was
Speaker 2: when DVD Birnie was brand new by one of these
Speaker 2: machines that cost thirty five thousand dollars. The manual alone
Speaker 2: was a thousand pages long, you can imagine. And Apple
Speaker 2: comes along and says, well, we'd like to buy that
Speaker 2: because we want the software that you've built and we're
Speaker 2: going to put that standard on the new Mac. So
Speaker 2: they're given a couple of weeks to prepare a slim
Speaker 2: lined streamlined I think as the term. I'm looking for
Speaker 2: version of what they've had before. And they just keep
Speaker 2: stripping this away. That's stripping away and stripping it away,
Speaker 2: and they're so proud of what they've been able to
Speaker 2: do in a couple of weeks, and they they're ready
Speaker 2: for the presentation to Steve Jobs, and he comes into
Speaker 2: the room. Before they get to the presentation, he walks
Speaker 2: up to the whiteboard, and he draws the rectangle and
Speaker 2: he draws this little you know, square within it that
Speaker 2: says burn. And he says, this is the app we're
Speaker 2: going to build. You just draw, take what you want
Speaker 2: to burn, you put it here, and then you click
Speaker 2: that button. That's the whole app. And as soon as
Speaker 2: he did that, they all felt embarrassed about the that
Speaker 2: they'd prepared. They never shared the presentation because compared to
Speaker 2: what he'd just shown, it looked so complex, there was
Speaker 2: so many steps and pieces to it. And that was
Speaker 2: when he learned what he thought was a really sort
Speaker 2: of lifelong valuable lesson, which is that Steve Jobs was
Speaker 2: starting with zero. It wasn't taking complexity and whittling it down.
Speaker 2: He was starting with zero and saying, you know, can
Speaker 2: I achieve it in one step? You know? And if
Speaker 2: not one, can I do it in two steps? But
Speaker 2: that's the idea. And so from that the goal is,
Speaker 2: can you solve a problem entirely by having in a
Speaker 2: one step thing? Can we remove the steps entirely instead
Speaker 2: of streamlining your process, you're saying, let's start from zero.
Speaker 2: Can we do the whole thing in one step? So
Speaker 2: that's the principle A particular way to approach simplification, it
Speaker 2: says Agile talks about it in the manif Agile manifesto.
Speaker 2: It's to maximize the steps not taken. If you can
Speaker 2: do this, you start to remove from yourself the need.
Speaker 2: No matter how easiest step is, it's still harder than
Speaker 2: taking no step. In fact, when I was first starting
Speaker 2: in the podcast, I remember the team, that production team
Speaker 2: sent me a list of instructions that I could send
Speaker 2: to guests and there's like, you know, fifteen steps to it.
Speaker 2: I remember reading it myself just going, oh my goodness,
Speaker 2: that is overwhelming number of steps. I just thought, there's
Speaker 2: no way I can send this out to guess it's
Speaker 2: just too much for them to handle if I can't
Speaker 2: even read it. And so I said, okay, what you know,
Speaker 2: start from zero was the minimum number of steps someone
Speaker 2: would need to take to chat with me on Zencaster.
Speaker 2: And once I had the answer, the process was literally
Speaker 2: what I sent to people instead of these fifteen steps
Speaker 2: was one click on the link that I'm going to
Speaker 2: email you before the interview too. I'll start and end
Speaker 2: the recording, so all you need to do is chat.
Speaker 2: That was the instruction, and so it's a very liberating
Speaker 2: question to ask, like just okay, how can we start
Speaker 2: from zero? How can we do this at the minimum
Speaker 2: number of steps? You start to realize all the stuff
Speaker 2: that other people think needs to happen, including yourself in
Speaker 2: the past, don't need to happen.
Speaker 1: That is it for today. If you know someone that
Speaker 1: might benefit from this tip, maybe someone that's been told
Speaker 1: to work smarter and not harder, why not share this
Speaker 1: episode with them? And if you're looking for more tips
Speaker 1: to improve the way that you work, I write a
Speaker 1: short fortnightly newslet app that contains three cool things that
Speaker 1: I've discovered that helped me work better, which range from
Speaker 1: interesting research findings through to gadgets that I'm loving. You
Speaker 1: can sign up for that at how I Work dot co.
Speaker 1: That's how I Work dot co. How I Work is
Speaker 1: produced by Inventing and with production support from Dead Set Studios,
Speaker 1: and thank you to Martin Nimba, who does the audio
Speaker 1: mix for every episode. See you next time.