I listened to author Juliet Funt as she summarized the big ideas from her book A Minute To Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busynss and Do Your Best Work on the Next Big Idea app, and this part resonated:
“There are four key drivers that cause companies, teams, and human beings to become overloaded. They are actually all assets that simply overgrow. We call them the Thieves of Time: drive, excellence, information, and activity. Despite being positive and helpful in their basic nature, these forces are also the biggest reason that white space disappears.
When taken to extremes, the Thieves of Time become corrupted:
- Drive becomes overdrive.
- Excellence becomes perfectionism.
- Information becomes information overload.
- Activity becomes downright frenzy.
Our job is to notice which one or ones tend to carry us away, and then reclaim control of that process. We want them to serve us.
We need a tool that will directly disarm them. That reductive tool is Simplification Questions. They are twenty-five words that I use just about every week, and each question maps back to one of the Thieves’ risks and becomes its remedy:
- Drive: Is there anything I can let go of?
- Excellence: Where is “good enough,” good enough?
- Information: What do I truly need to know?
- Activity: What deserves my attention?
Each person finds resonance with a different question and that’s their charm. We’re drawn to the ones we need most. The questions can be used at the individual level or at the team and organizational level. They endlessly and nimbly allow us to amplify the best by removing the rest.”
