What can you eliminate from your life?

If you are a maniac like me, you keep trying to optimize the way you work and live your life so you can get more things done quicker. And maybe you even succeed and squeeze out 10% here and 5% there.

While there is nothing wrong with that, I had a personal aha-moment this week:

There is way more time and effort wasted on doing things that don't matter than on doing the things that matter inefficiently.

Meaning for example, why on earth would I obsess over automating a small part of my content writing process (which saves me a couple of minutes each week), when out of sheer habit I literally waste an hour every day reading news articles I don't care about?

This makes glaringly obvious that my content writing inefficiency is not the thing I should focus on optimizing my time and effort.

Doing things that don't matter.

But what does it mean to "eliminate things that don't matter"?

What if I really enjoy reading the newspaper, playing video games or flipping through Instagram stories? Well then, by all means: Go out and have fun!

What we arguably shouldn't do however, is to mindlessly do things we don't care for just because we got used to doing them.

If we think about it: How much of our time is wasted each day, week, month and year on things that don't matter to us (or the people in our lives) at all?

• We do them out of unconscious habit.
• We do them because we've always done them.
• We do them because someone told us to a long time ago.
• We do them because at some point in the past it seemed (or was!) important to us.

But times change. Circumstances change. Our goals change.

So if we think about the hours and the mental effort we waste on things that don't matter, it's okay to change our minds. It's okay to drop what we've been doing and decide to focus our time elsewhere.

So where do I start eliminating?

The meaningless can hide in the small things (opening that news app every morning) and in the big things (working in a job that sucks the life out of you).

The first step is to get the awareness of what the heck we are actually doing all day. I started making a brief list of the things that I spend my time on every day and ask myself these two questions for every item on that list:

• Does it mean anything to me?
• Did I enjoy doing it?

If it's two 'No's', I put a little asterisk (*) mark next to the item. If you do this for a week or two and you find a bunch of asterisks next to one activity (which was the case for news reading for me), then this is a serious contender for elimination.

And don't get me wrong. This shit's hard.

But I realized I can safely stop over-engineering the things that already work and mean something in my life, and focus on eliminating the things that don't first.