If you work in a big organization or even a small one, you've probably heard someone say we need to work smarter, not harder. Well, that sounds good in theory, but how do you actually do that in practice. Greg McEwan is the New York Times bestselling author of Essentialism and Effortless and has thought a lot about the way that he works and how he can make it simpler, easier, and more fun. So how does Greg actually simplify his work and what does it mean to really streamline a
process or a workflow? And the next time someone says to you that you need to work smarter and not harder, what should you actually change. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy invent Him. And this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work. On today is my favorite Tip episode? Will you go back to an interview from the past and I pick
out my favorite tip from that interview. In today's show, I speak with Greg mceew and we start by talking about an idea that Greg wrote about in Effortless that he refers to as the minimum steps required for completion and I was keen to hear about how Greg has applied this idea in his own life.
Just to set that up just for a second. There's all sorts of examples of this in business. But I interviewed Mike Evangelist who as that's his real name, but he worked at a DVD burning company, and this was when DVD Birnie was brand new by one of these machines that cost thirty five thousand dollars. The manual alone was a thousand pages long, you can imagine. And Apple comes along and says, well, we'd like to buy that because we want the software that you've built and we're
going to put that standard on the new Mac. So they're given a couple of weeks to prepare a slim lined streamlined I think as the term. I'm looking for version of what they've had before. And they just keep stripping this away. That's stripping away and stripping it away, and they're so proud of what they've been able to do in a couple of weeks, and they they're ready for the presentation to Steve Jobs, and he comes into
the room. Before they get to the presentation, he walks up to the whiteboard, and he draws the rectangle and he draws this little you know, square within it that says burn. And he says, this is the app we're going to build. You just draw, take what you want to burn, you put it here, and then you click that button. That's the whole app. And as soon as he did that, they all felt embarrassed about the that
they'd prepared. They never shared the presentation because compared to what he'd just shown, it looked so complex, there was so many steps and pieces to it. And that was when he learned what he thought was a really sort of lifelong valuable lesson, which is that Steve Jobs was starting with zero. It wasn't taking complexity and whittling it down. He was starting with zero and saying, you know, can I achieve it in one step? You know? And if not one, can I do it in two steps? But
that's the idea. And so from that the goal is, can you solve a problem entirely by having in a one step thing? Can we remove the steps entirely instead of streamlining your process, you're saying, let's start from zero. Can we do the whole thing in one step? So that's the principle A particular way to approach simplification, it says Agile talks about it in the manif Agile manifesto. It's to maximize the steps not taken. If you can do this, you start to remove from yourself the need.
No matter how easiest step is, it's still harder than taking no step. In fact, when I was first starting in the podcast, I remember the team, that production team sent me a list of instructions that I could send to guests and there's like, you know, fifteen steps to it. I remember reading it myself just going, oh my goodness, that is overwhelming number of steps. I just thought, there's no way I can send this out to guess it's just too much for them to handle if I can't
even read it. And so I said, okay, what you know, start from zero was the minimum number of steps someone would need to take to chat with me on Zencaster. And once I had the answer, the process was literally what I sent to people instead of these fifteen steps was one click on the link that I'm going to email you before the interview too. I'll start and end the recording, so all you need to do is chat.
That was the instruction, and so it's a very liberating question to ask, like just okay, how can we start from zero? How can we do this at the minimum number of steps? You start to realize all the stuff that other people think needs to happen, including yourself in the past, don't need to happen.
That is it for today. If you know someone that might benefit from this tip, maybe someone that's been told to work smarter and not harder, why not share this episode with them? And if you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newslet app that contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better, which range from interesting research findings through to gadgets that I'm loving. You can sign up for that at how I Work dot co.
That's how I Work dot co. How I Work is produced by Inventing and with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba, who does the audio mix for every episode. See you next time.