Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

This book was a pleasure to read; a pleasant surprise after Essentialism. I liked the book but I thought it was needlessly long. This book, on the other hand, is filled with crisp topics covering each of the aspects on point. I find myself agreeing with the author in the introduction that essentialism is one thing: it is fine (and maybe even easy) to limit ourselves to only the most important things; you know, the big rocks in the jar. But sometimes there are so many big rocks that the jar overflows anyway.

“Effortless” addresses this by looking at a variety of different aspects of life and how do you begin making that rock smaller. It begins with describing the Effortless State, goes on to talk about Effortless Action, and finishes with Effortless Results. The labels are mostly arbitrary, IMHO, but they are still a useful way to think about the different areas of our lives where we could rethink how we think about our efforts.

I'm glad I read this book and the repeated summary after each section in the book is highly useful. I am going to store that in my notes and recapture the essence of the book any time I want.

Very good core message with a few valuable insights to take forward. Much like Essentialism, the book seemed to really stretch out the concepts with long winded explanations which is common with best sellers of the genre. Overall, a very positive experience and a book I'd happily recommend.

So many good nuggets in this book. I don't remember loving Essentialism - I thought it was a great book, but it didn't cover a lot of new ground for me. But I'm also a natural minimalist and I read a lot of this kind of thing, so purely a personal opinion, and still a book worth reading.

Effortless, I'd like to own. He begins by discussing this myth that everything good must be hard/take effort, and references the fact that it might be due in part to Puritanism. Yes, but also overwork and the productivity cult are a product of Capitalism that could be an entire book in and of itself (and probably is). Stopping to think about that fact alone is worth the price of admission, but there are many practical tips that are incredibly valuable. The one that most stood out to me was to set an upper limit on tasks/habits. I have a set schedule for business development projects: minimum 30 minutes. I tend to go way over. The simple idea of setting a limit (no more than 1 hour per session) is kind of brilliant, and it's the kind of gem you'll find in Effortless.

You will not find any deep dive into habit development here, which I appreciate. For that we have Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit, and James Clear's inestimable Atomic Habits.

As a huge fan of McKeown's first book Essentialism (which I reread periodically), I had really high expectations for this. But unfortunately it lacked strength and felt too obvious. Many aspects of this book can be found in Gretchen Rubin's much more detailed book Better than Before, such as the Strategy of Pairing.