Eliminate: Get Rid Of What You Don’t Need First, Optimize Later
Optimizing your current workflow can help you become more productive. But have you wondered if you’re even doing the right things in the first place?
Whether it’s clients, products, or processes, you’ve likely got more on your plate than you need. Rather than optimizing everything right from the get go, you should prioritize what’s most important first.
This essay is Part One of a three-part series on how to streamline your workflow to become more productive.
As new technologies come online, it’s going to lead to the proliferation of a whole host of new tools and services. Just because artificial intelligence can build a website or draft social media posts in Canva doesn’t mean it should.
Trying to stay on top of new features – as well as new technologies – can feel overwhelming leading to less productivity.
This first essay is about elimination. It focuses on getting rid of everything that is unnecessary and unessential first, so you can prioritize optimizing the things that are actually important.
Before you do anything, eliminate things you no longer need
Back in 2019, I started my first blog Millionaire By Next Year. I studied successful bloggers in my niche and made a list of all the tools they used on their websites. I thought if I wanted to be successful, I should use the same tools as the pros.
It ended up being a total flop. I didn’t understand that the business model underpinning most blogs is advertising. And I didn’t know that advertising is a game of eyeballs driven by SEO. I wrote content that I thought was interesting, not content that I thought could rank in search results.
Even though my blog didn’t generate any revenue, I paid for email management tools, design licenses, and social media scheduling software that I thought I needed for it to be successful. Instead, I pretty much flushed money down the toilet.
That didn’t stop my software subscriptions from multiplying though. I kept adding new tools to my blog believing a specific feature would help me finally start generating revenue. At one point I was paying for a dozen tools to manage a non-revenue-generating blog.
Eventually, I gave up. I decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze and I stopped producing content for that blog. I came to the realization that I didn’t need all the subscriptions I was paying for and cut those too.
The problem wasn’t the tools I was using, it was that I studied bloggers who had started their blogs in the early 2010s and tried to replicate their success. The game had changed and I was completely oblivious to it. Adding more tools with neat features wasn’t going to change that.
Now imagine if I had approached the problem from a different perspective. What if I decided I needed to streamline my processes to become more efficient first rather than pivoting to a new content strategy?
If I had asked that question when I was still running my blog, I would have tried to optimize everything I was doing, including things I didn’t actually need.
Take social media as an example to understand what I mean. Some of the bloggers I followed had large followings on Instagram so I thought I had to create content for Instagram too. I paid for a Canva license to design content and I paid for Later to schedule it.
Turns out, Instagram isn’t a good fit for bloggers. While lots of people use Instagram, less than 1% of the traffic coming to an Instagram post actually clicks through to an external website link. And to be honest, if you’re not paying for ads, the click-through rate is probably significantly lower than that.
From an optimization perspective, it doesn’t make sense to optimize a process around creating Instagram content when it’s very clear Instagram does not lead to the desired outcome – more website traffic. Why waste time and effort building out a process that isn’t going to generate the results you want?
This is where elimination comes in. Instead of adding on to whatever it is you’re doing, eliminate things you no longer need. The more you eliminate up front the less you have to optimize to be more productive.
To figure out what to eliminate, use the Pareto Principle which says 80% of outputs come from 20% of inputs. For a business, that means 80% of your revenue might come from 20% of your customers or 20% of your product offerings. For an individual, 80% of your productivity comes from 20% of your inputs. Put a different way: most of your productivity comes from working on fewer things.
The less you have to manage, the more productive you will be. Here are a few things you can look to cut:
Software or digital tools
Projects
Products
People (employees or clients)
Before you develop any plan to optimize your workflow, start by first looking for things you can eliminate first.
Take an inventory and use an audit to figure out what to eliminate
While the idea of getting rid of superfluous things that you don’t actually need might seem like a no-brainer, it can be daunting. How exactly do you know what to cut?
To get started, take an inventory of everything. Make a list of all the software tools you use. Use your calendar to document how you use your time. Jot down all the projects you’re working on or the products your business is selling.
Once you’ve taken an inventory, do an audit of yourself, your workflow, and/or your business.
When I ran my blog, I audited myself by comparing the amount of time I spent working on my blog with the number of tools I was using to manage it. Even though I was spending $30 a month for an email management tool, for example, I spent maybe less than five hours using it per year.
Unsurprisingly, my email list wasn’t growing and because I wasn’t seeing progress, I didn’t particularly enjoy using the software. And because I wasn’t using the software, I wasn’t learning how to use all the features that came with it.
What’s the point of optimizing a process that uses a tool you aren’t investing time into learning how to properly use in the first place?
Take an inventory of what you use and how you use it. Your revenue or productivity is directly tied to how you spend your time. If you’re paying for software, memberships, or newsletters you’re not investing time into using, that is a good indicator of what you should cut first.
You can read more about how to conduct a time audit on yourself here.
Build systems after you eliminate things you don’t need
You want to start eliminating rather than optimizing first because we are quickly descending into the technological unknown. There’s a good chance if you’re not already overwhelmed you’re about to be.
Here’s what I mean. ChatGPT was first released to the public in November 2022. By next year OpenAI plans to release agents that can perform work by itself. In the span of three years, we’ve completely changed how work is done and now we’re about to unleash the equivalent of digital interns into the white collar workforce.
There’s a good chance you’re not fully using ChatGPT as it exists at this moment to augment your current workflow. You’re definitely not ready to onboard an AI agent (I know I’m not).
That’s why you need to whittle down what you’re working on first. By getting hyper-focused you can learn how to use all these new tools that are coming down the pike. If you try to optimize everything you’re currently working on, you’re going to become overwhelmed and won’t use any of the tools well.
Think about this like following a diet. You can count calories, track macros, restrict your feeding window, or follow a specific diet protocol to lose weight. But if you try to do everything all at once – log your calories, stay within your macros, and intermittent fast – you’re probably going to fail at one of those things and give up on the whole project. By focusing on doing just one thing and doing it really well, you have a better chance of success.
The less stuff you have to worry about, the more focused you can become. The more focused you are, the more productive you will be.
Eliminate anything you don’t need first, then build a system to optimize what remains.
When I ran my blog, I had to not only write new articles, I had to maintain the website in WordPress, evaluate data in Google Analytics, market my blog on social media, and maintain my email list. On top of that, I had to create digital products and develop content for affiliate partners to try to eke out some revenue. I felt like I was constantly spread too thin.
I don’t create content for that blog anymore but I’m still creating content online. One of the reasons why I moved to Substack is because it consolidated the amount of overhead I needed to manage, freeing up my bandwidth to get better at my craft.
Substack houses my email list and takes care of SEO. It has an easy analytics dashboard for me to follow and the design process is super simple. There’s an in-platform social media tool and I can create pages to house my workshops (like this one).
Now instead of trying to become a great blogger managing a dozen different tools, each with their own processes, I can focus on becoming a great writer on Substack.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about your career, business, or personal life, by paring things down it will be easier to develop processes and rapidly implement changes that you’ll need to stay relevant in the years to come.
How to get started
To get started, choose an area you want to focus on. I’d recommend starting with establishing some boundaries around technology first. This is something Cal Newport talks about in Digital Minimalism:
Digital Minimalism: The Key Principles to Follow to Improve Your Quality of Life
In today’s day and age, the idea of digital minimalism can be a turn-off. It almost feels impossible to live without a smartphone.
By focusing on your relationship with tech, you can set a strong foundation that will guide how you approach process development and optimization later on.
From there, take an inventory of everything you use and audit yourself. A time audit is a good way to show whether or not you’re investing time into using – or even learning – how to use tools you’re paying for. It will also reveal where you’re wasting time so you can course correct if necessary.
The two best places to start eliminating are your email and software subscriptions. If you reduce the amount of emails coming into your inbox, you reduce the amount of time you need to spend managing it. Likewise, if you use only a few digital tools, then you’ll only be responsible for staying up to date on those specific tools.
WORKSHOP: Fire Your Inbox: An Email Management System for Busy Knowledge Workers
Do you know how much time you spend each day doing productive work?
The process of elimination is iterative. Look for the easiest place to begin eliminating and start getting rid of things you don’t need. The more you practice eliminating things, the easier elimination will become later on.
Further reading
Elimination isn’t just a productivity hack, it’s a life skill. To dive deeper, check out these books:
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