January 2022 – Essentialism

Hanka Jadavan, a member of the Red Button network, shares her thoughts on the book.

Focus on what matters

The book is a popular guide to streamlining managerial thinking and actions. It’s useful for anyone who wants to improve their decision-making processes, save time, better focus on key tasks, handle them well, and align with a clear, forward-looking personal development strategy. It also teaches how not to succumb to external pressure that tries to exploit a worker’s willingness and kindness by offloading problems and tasks onto them. It’s about not getting distracted, working purposefully, and focusing only on the right things. In other words, as one of many variations of P. F. Drucker’s saying goes, “Doing the right things right,” or in the author’s own words, “Less, but better.” As the author himself says: “… it’s hard to find a more fitting definition of Essentialism.” Our time is obsessed with ideas like “doing more,” “getting more done,” which often leads to barely managing to “do everything” with great effort. Behind this can lie personal motives, such as trying to please everyone. We fear missing out, upsetting someone, or overlooking something. So many of us rush from one thing to another, life passes by, and results are nowhere to be seen.

There are many activities and opportunities in the world, more than we have time and resources to invest in. And while many of them can be good, and some even very good, the reality is that most are trivial and only a few are truly essential. Essentialism means learning to distinguish between them – learning to sift through them all and select only those that are truly crucial – the essential ones. Essentialism isn’t about how to get more done, but how to get the important things done. It’s not about doing less just to save time and effort. It’s about investing your time and energy as wisely as possible so you can contribute at the highest level of your abilities. Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach to identifying the point of your highest contribution and accomplishing the most important things almost effortlessly. Essentialists live according to a concept; they don’t follow randomness. They deliberately distinguish a few key things from many trivial ones, cut off the nonessential, and remove obstacles so that the essentials can be taken on a pre-cleared, smooth path. In other words, the essentialist approach is about maintaining full control over your own choices. It’s a path to a new level of success and meaningfulness.

Who is Hanka Jadavan?

Hanka prefers to call herself an Agilefluencer. She believes that adults in companies should be treated like adults and that we can only reach our full potential if we have the freedom to make independent decisions, work on things that truly matter to us, and have the opportunity to develop in all directions. Her personal mission is to support the development of self-organized teams and freedom and happiness at work.

She shares her knowledge and practical experience mostly through training and mentoring in agility, modern leadership, and self-development. She is also a co-founder of the #CzechAgile community, whose mission is to bring agility back in companies from processes to agile values and principles. In her free time, she writes reviews of training and self-development books on Instagram.