Minimizing efforts ​

We strive to perform actions not just anyhow, but with the least effort required to achieve the desired level of quality. Both parts of the sentence are important here: the one about "the least effort" and the one about "the desired level of quality," otherwise the sentence can be misinterpreted as "just try to do less, and that's it." No, it's not like that.

We want to find out how much effort is needed to achieve a certain result. For example, how much effort does it take to become an outstanding pianist? Clearly more than what an average music school student, even one with talent, puts in. The advice of "just try to do less, and that's it" won't work. It's about something else: if a student can become an outstanding pianist while still not giving up family and leisure time, and just as outstanding by giving up everything else and becoming unhappy, then the second path is clearly not very good.

In everyday life, when we describe work not done with the minimum effort, we usually say "didn't get tired - didn't work." This is absolutely not necessary: you can achieve just as much or even more while getting less tired^[1]. To do this, it is important to choose what needs to be done, when the work will be considered done "well enough," "excellent" or "outstanding," and to do it with the least effort.

In addition to efforts on individual actions, we will also strive to minimize the following:

• Volume of work: the demand for tasks at work and at home exceeds the "supply," so we need to choose where to direct our efforts;
• Amount of information: we try to identify and process what's important, not everything;
• Losses, which are important for both companies and individuals.

Everywhere, we will apply the same principle: first minimize the unnecessary/bad, for example, unnecessary meetings, and then focus on maximizing the necessary, for example, the quality of important tasks.