How much of your life is spent being busy?
Ever feel as if between work and home life there is simply no time … hours disappear into days, days into weeks and before you know it you need a holiday just to sleep off the madness?
Being super busy has almost become a form of success. I speak to an old friend every 6 months and words like “it’s crazy”, “doesn’t stop”, and “need a break” have been repeated for the last 20 years. My sister is always “its madness”, “rushed” etc – We are busy fools…
Lean Living needs to be called something else as images of healthy eating, diets, and hours in the gym come to mind, but Lean Living is much more. It is not about living frugally, nor does it mean limiting good stuff. In fact, it means the complete opposite – it’s about living as close to max as possible, spending your time, and your energy in the optimal way for you to maximise your value and the processes necessary to achieve it.
Lean by definition is the maximisation of value generated by the eradication and elimination of any activity which does not add value to the process and the customer. We need to focus on the most important tasks – 80/20 Rule.
Within the idea of lean Living, the process is to continually make steps to achieve what is really important to us every day. It’s these steps we take daily which make the difference. It’s the choices we make on how to spend our time and how we spend our emotional and physical energy.
The end goal is some future state, the place we want to be in some future time.
We might never get there and it’s likely the desired future state will change as we move forward and priorities change, but what’s important is the continuous striving, the continual improvements and continuously validated learnings that help us every day to improve ourselves, our situation and improve the lives of those people important to us.
Eric Reis in Lean Startup says “The only way to win is to learn faster than everyone else” and Lean Living is just this. How fast can you learn and design the lifestyle you want?
