Concept
Automate the essential
Automating the essential means setting up a repeating essential task once, through automation, a checklist or a fixed routine, so that it keeps happening without fresh decisions or willpower, and only after deciding that the task deserves to continue.
Greg McKeown distinguishes in Effortless between effort that pays once and effort that keeps paying. An hour spent doing a task gives one result; an hour spent setting it up to run by itself, or to take five minutes next time, gives a result every time it recurs. Three tools carry the idea: automation for what can run without us, such as a standing transfer or a recurring calendar block; checklists for what cannot, so that doing it right does not depend on memory; and routines tied to a fixed time and place. The value of checklists is well documented outside the book, for example in a 2009 multi-country study of the World Health Organization's surgical safety checklist. The warning is that automation makes anything effortless, including the wrong things, so it comes after choosing, never before.
A real-life example
An architect running a small practice in Eskişehir lost an evening a month chasing invoices and started every project with the same forty emails. She set automatic reminders on day seven and day fourteen, wrote a one-page project start checklist, and booked a fifteen-minute review every Friday. Within two months the evenings were hers again.
How to use it
- 1List the essential tasks you repeat weekly or monthly and decide, for each, whether it can run by itself or needs a checklist.
- 2Before automating anything, confirm it still passes your criteria for a clear yes.
- 3Book a short weekly review to check that what runs automatically still deserves to.