I started listening to a book yesterday called The Lazy Genius Way: Embrace What Matters, Ditch What Doesn't, and Get Stuff Done by Kendra Adachi. I really liked the chapter about deciding once. I think I suffer from decision overload and the more I look for work, the more decisions there are out there. I love the idea of just choosing once and then sticking to that decision. I do this in some areas of my life, but certainly not all of them and now it's made me start thinking what other areas of life I can do this in.
For example, she suggests you choose once what meals you're going to eat on which days. If you don't want to restrict yourself to choosing the actual exact meal, choose what type of meal. So Monday is Italian, Tuesday soup, Wednesday Pizza, etc. That way you only have to make small decisions rather than choose from a 100,000 potential meals. She even has a list of ingredients and she only makes recipes that can be made from those ingredients, so if a recipe calls for something that's not on her list, she doesn't use it.
I think this kind of thinking would work well for my personality. When I find a product I like, I do stick with it and I find that much simpler than going to the shops and choosing from a plethora of different brands. I buy toilet paper from Who Gives A Crap, a company I totally love as they are funny, have fabulous marketing and packaging and contribute half their profits to building toilets in places where there are none. I buy Koh cleaning products because I can use one product to clean everything in my house and it is a non-toxic, environmentally friendly company and I love their spray bottles. It actually makes me want to clean and means I don't have to stand in the cleaning products aisle at the shop and figure out what the best option is.
I'd never thought about why I found these two products so satisfying in my life until I listened to that book and Kendra talked about deciding once. I'm going to apply this principle to as many areas of life as possible and see how simple I can make things. I'm trying to think of ways to apply it to my job search. I'm going to focus on one type of job I'm interested in at a time and do as much research as I can to discover if it's something I want to pursue further, before I move on to another type of job. I think at the moment I'm trying to explore too many options at once.
This week I'm going to focus on finding out about being a professional organizer and decluttering expert. I'm meeting up with a lady who is one and hopefully it will give me some idea on whether or not it's something to pursue further. I'm also hoping to help a friend via zoom to organise her space. Since both of these things are already happening next week already, it seems a good week to focus on that.
What areas of life do you decide once in?
My quote for today is from Xun Zi, a Chinese philosopher living around 312 BC, on the importance of focus: "The person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere."
My photo for today is of me and my wonderful husband, Phil. The best decide once decision I've made so far in life.
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