KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid – is the best acronym isn’t it?
And one of the least followed bits of advice ever to flow. I know from myself. I like to stretch out tasks that should take me 45 minutes into 3 hours. Lack of focus, planning and organization contradict KISS.
And that’s too bad because it turns out KISS can also be good for health. More and more studies, like this one reported on Bloomberg:
Bloomberg – Stress Linked to Alzheimer’s in Midlife
are showing that stress severely impairs health. In fact, stress, and its cousin, lack of sleep, have been shown to have serious health effects – enough to override the healthy eating, vitamins and exercise routine you currently take/do. So for those of you leading stress filled lives just to accumulate cash, maybe it’s time to use your brain to be productive without the stress.
Put Solution in Action – to Stress Free Simplicity
What I’ve been doing, ever since having a great conversation with Paul Kingsman (pictured below) at Starbucks in Novato, CA, is pushing myself to be more focused and to keep life more simple each day. KISS can help with that. And interestingly, I feel it will further reduce my stress.
Some of you may not know, I can be a high stress person. Maybe it’s genetic, maybe it’s learned behavior from an easily-excitable italian family. I don’t know. What I do know is that the potential for high stress is there. So I’ve taken steps in life to avoid it rather than trying to fight it (the AA approach to alcohol). For example, my office is walking distance from my home. Why? Because I don’t like traffic and I think other drivers are crazy. Now you can argue that maybe I’m the crazy one etc but why argue? I’ll just avoid the traffic and avoid the stress.
Corporate hierarchy is another annoyance of mine. Doing things a certain way because that’s “how we’ve always done it” wouldn’t cut it with me .So I suffered the pains of entrepreneurialism so that I can avoid that and run my business my way.
KISS and Paul’s advice have been the latest iterations of this move to stress free simplicity. Furthermore, I have been thinking hard and reading a lot about how others plan their day. For example I’ve read among dozens of examples of just how other successful people plan their day:
Jack Dorsey’s schedule (founder of twitter) (who has a rather full schedule)
Daily Rituals – How Artists Work (an eclectic – as you can imagine – mix of daily routines of productive artists)
And I have been working on my own schedule incorporating these idea and testing my latest schedule break-though. See, I was typically an evening person. I like to work at night. But a baby waking up at 5 or 530 AM doesn’t work well with my old schedule of waking up at 730 and easing out of bed after AM reading at 8. So I am testing starting work at 6AM and not working at night (there’s more to it than that but it’s customized for the tasks I do specifically in my business including client service, planning work, investment research, and back office operations).
Let’s see how this works. In the meantime, what can you be doing to reduce stress in your life? Have you:
- checked into ways to improve your sleep (how well do you know yourself?)
- Found ways to improve or eliminate your commute?
- Worked on better communication to cut down arguments and stress with family, friends and coworkers?
- Considered working for yourself?
- Other ideas to cut stress?
Let me know if you have come up with any breakthroughs.
