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Click on the image to visit Elegant Themes!

Less is more in many ways.

It’s certainly the case when speaking of the effects I experienced after reading Leo Babauta’s book, The Power of Less: the fine art of limiting yourself to the essential…in business and in life.

If you’re not familiar with Leo Babauta, he’s the author behind ZenHabits.net, a blog that is a must read if you’re interested in living simply, efficiently, and productively.

Leo is also the author of Zen To Done, an eBook that teaches Leo’s simple yet effective system of managing time, projects, and everything else on your plate.  (You can check out my review of ZTD here.)

Practical Lessons from The Power of Less (TPoL)

Remember when you were a kid and life seemed so simple? You were free to play whenever you wanted and free to choose who you wanted to spend time with.

Taking a moment to reflect on the simplicity of those years, don’t you wish your life was that simple and carefree today?

TPoL is about making your life simple again. It may not ever be as carefree as it once was, but life can be a lot less stressful and complicated by returning to its inherent simplicity.

Leo’s approach to returning to the simplicity you once enjoyed in life focuses on making conscious choices. And there are only two.

Choice #1: Identify the Essential

There is so much clutter in our lives today.  We are continually bombarded by choices of all kinds.  Just walk down the cereal aisle at the grocery store and you’re confronted with a myriad of possibilities…and that’s only breakfast!

But our lives become cluttered at light speed. Before long we’ve collected a lot of physical stuff as well as way too much mental clutter.

So how do you get back to that simple existence of your childhood? Identifying only what it essential is the place to begin.

Choice #2: Eliminate the Rest

After you’ve chosen only what’s essential, you’re free to jettison the rest.

Take my briefcase. One day not too long ago I realized that I was carrying all kinds of needless items to and from the office. I decided to take Leo’s advice and pare down my daily load to only the essentials.

When I eliminated what wasn’t essential, not only was my briefcase lighter (which meant my neck didn’t hurt any longer from carrying around all that crap), but the energy around it was more positive.

You know that feeling when you walk into your teenager’s room and you can’t see the floor? Or open a ‘junk drawer’ and close it immediately because the thought of sifting through all the junk is intimidating?  That’s what it felt like each time I opened my briefcase. Yuk.

TPoL TOC

Here’s how Leo has organized the book:

Part One – The Principles In this section Leo lays out the principles behind TPoL approach to life. Each chapter needs to be read carefully because though Leo write in a simple, straightforward manner, each sentence is packed with meaning.

1. Why Less is Powerful
2. The Art of Setting Limits
3. Choosing the Essential, and Simplifying
4. Simple Focus
5. Create New Habits, and TPoL Challenge

Part Two – In Practice Here’s where the rubber meets the road.  Putting TPoL principles into practice is at once liberating and relaxing.  I say relaxing because I’ve found that when I reduce to what’s essential and lest the rest go, my energy is more positive and my attitude is more relaxed.

1. Simple Goals and Projects
2. Simple Tasks
3. Simple Time Management
4. Simple Email
5. Simple Internet
6. Simple Filing
7. Simple Commitments
8. Simple Daily Routine
9. Declutter Your Workspace
10. Slow Down
11. Simple Health and Fitness
12. On Motivation

TPoL is a great read, especially during  summer when most of us have a lot of projects that need to be completed before fall. It’s a slim volume, only 170 pages and packaged in a simple, yet elegant, hardback cover.  It’s even available on the Kindle for just $9.99.

I urge you to read TPol and put into practice it’s simple, direct teachings. I’m glad I did!

Preview the Hardback Book Here on Amazon.com

I’ve been a fan of most of Wayne Dyer’s books and PBS talks for years.  He’s a modern philosopher and spiritual teacher in the lineage of Emerson and Thoreau.

In fact, I credit one of the most significant shifts in my life to his book Your Sacred Self. I recommend it anyone seeking their own version of truth.

The book I’m reading now is his latest, Excuses Begone! How to Change Lifelong, Self-Defeating Thinking Habits.

Part I opens with the following quote by Lao-tzu: 

“Every human being’s essential nature is perfect and faultless, but after years of immersion in the world we easily forget our roots and take on a counterfeit nature.”

How true this is.

Old psychic tapes, popular culture, even mainstream religion teaches the opposite: You’re too young, too old, not strong enough, not mature enough, too inexperienced, lacking in real-world experience…the list of excuses are endless.

While these are well-meaning and for the most part well-intentioned, we fall victim to the ‘mind viruses’ they impart.  Dyer believes these mental memes or mind viruses to be as infectious as influenza.

I think he’s right.

In my own life I’ve seen the effects of belief in any number of these excuses.  And while each false belief needs to be individually assessed in our own lives, I belive that false beliefs about our abilitites or inabilities (excuses) are all too easy to access and live by.

Some false beliefs lead to lying.

There was a time in my life when I lied about nearly everything. I was in high school at the time and not only was I the shortest person among the 1200 students (true) but I was also the most insignificant (a false belief in my life at the time).

Because I believed I was so insignificant (growing up hearing that I was a failure only reinforced this), I felt I needed to create a world that was more attractive to others, more attractive to myself, and one that allowed me to feel that I mattered in some way.

I created experiences that were totally false, and even cut out magazine photos and tried to pass them off as myself to my friends.

I look back on it now and I laugh a little -and cry a little, too-, but at the time, the false belief that I would always be a failure was so pervasive that creating this false world where I was the center of attention seemed like my only hope.

The Book’s Organization

Part I  – Identifying and Removing Habitual Thinking: In this section Dyers sets the stage for making possible the journey that lies ahead.  There is a chapter that examines the most common excuses we use and how to overcome them.

There is a saying that when you turn on the light, the darkness shrinks and truth is revealed.  This portion of the book is similar to turning on the lights.  Excuses become exposed for what they are when the lights of commonsense and truth are flipped on.

Part II – Key Principles: In this section Dyer puts forth and examines seven principles that help make excuses a thing of the past.  Each chapter in this section has tips for applying the prinicples to your life.

Admittedly, this is where most authors like Dyer go wrong, in my opinion. Seven principles and the seven questions in Part III are a bit much to keep track of…or is that just an excuse?

Part III- Excuses Begone – A Paradigm Shift: In the final section, Dyer writes about seven questions to pose when examining the validity of something you believe abut yourself.  By asking these questions, you can be in a better position to know whether or not this belief serves or deludes you.

I recommend this book.

If you’d like to read more about it and look at the table of contents, click on the images on this page and they will take you to the Amazon.com site where you you can look inside the book and decide for yourself.

What are you reading?

What book has you currently secreting away hours at a time to read?  Is it something you’d recommend?  Tell us what you think by leaving a comment.  As always, your comments are welcome! :)

Can you become a more effective and happier Solo-Dad in about a month?

I think you can!

Ever since I read and participated in Darren Rowse’s 31 Days To Building a Better Blog series on ProBlogger.net (now a downloadable workbook available for only $19.95), I’ve thought about this concept of improving areas of one’s life in a month.

Naturally, here on Solo-Dad, my mind turns to helping other solo-dads become better at being the dad they want to be for their kids.

Borrowing the concept from Darren’s playbook, I’m embarking on this new series….

31 Days To Becoming a Better Solo-Dad!

In this series of posts, I’m going to write 31 posts, each about a different aspect of being a solo-dad. Each post will focused on one topic with a bit of teaching about the topic and at least one practical tip for application.

The purpose behind writing the series does not include the expectation that you can become a Super Solo-Dad in 31 days.  Rather, it’s to provide you with a resource to use when topics covered in the series apply to your family.

Here’s a partial list of topic that will be covered in the 31 Days to Become a Better Solo-Dad series that begins July 31st:

• Pay your child support on time (yes, it’s a good thing).
• Make time with your child a priority.
• Avoid the Disneyland Dad Syndrome.
• Don’t talk smack about your Ex in front of your child.
• Reconsider your views on spanking (Why you shouldn’t).
• Plan your menus in advance.
• Keep your dates away from the kids.
• Exercise with your kids.
• And many more.

How can you participate? Just check your RSS reader each day beginning July 31.

Not a subscriber? Subscribe now to the series using the following links:

Here’s a brief snippet…

“I regret that I don’t have the chance to sit on the floor next to his bed every night while he puts his hand on mind.

Or stroke his hair until he falls asleep and the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning is his smiling face as he taps me on the shoulder because its time to get up.”

Once you get to the end, the comments left my readers are quite emotional. 

Click here to read the post.

Too many kids in the inner cities across the country are trapped day in and day out by concrete jungles.

When I think about my own childhood, I know I took the outdoors and the woods across the street for granted.

Today, LE and I walk the beach almost daily. I can’t imagine not being this close to nature; but for many kids today it remains a dream.

Enter The Fresh Air Fund

THE FRESH AIR FUND, an independent, not-for-profit agency, has provided free summer vacations to more than 1.7 million New York City children from low-income communities since 1877.

Nearly 10,000 New York City children enjoy free Fresh Air Fund programs annually. In 2008, close to 5,000 children visited volunteer host families in suburbs and small town communities across 13 states from Virginia to Maine and Canada.

3,000 children also attended five Fresh Air camps on a 2,300-acre site in Fishkill, New York.

The Fund’s year-round camping program serves an additional 2,000 young people each year.

If you’re near the East Coast and might be able to host a child, consider giving the folks at TFAF a call at 1-800-367-0003.  Or if you’re a bit outside NY like me,  you can donate to their cause by clicking on the little square in the sidebar.

Either way, some lucky child will remember what you do forever.

When that happens, I’m usually pretty quick to tell my readers about it.

One such gem is Leo Babauta’s eBook, Zen To Done . Leo writes one of my favorite blogs, Zen Habits.

The funny thing is, Leo isn’t a Buddhist or a Zen practitioner. He’s simply a regular guy who lives in Guam, holds down a full-time job, helps his wife Eva raise their six kids, and somehow manages to write a phenomenally practical blog (that reads like prose) on a regular basis.

Zen To Done (ZTD) is based on the work of David Allen and the Getting Things Done (GTD) planning and work-flow system. You might wonder how anyone could improve upon the GTD system, but Leo has done it. As Leo points out…

“GTD is a brilliant system, and works very well. But ZTD takes some of the problems that people have implementing it, adds other powerful concepts, and adapts the system for real life.”

I’ve been around the time management block a few times in me 50 years. I used to teach time management at the college level in the 90s. I’m familiar with the Franklin system, Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits system, and a whole host of others.

Zen To Done is unique in that it aids your efforts to get things accomplished quickly and efficiently without focusing on the system itself.

In that way, it’s brilliant.

Too many systems (GTD included) focus the user so much on getting the system right that they lose touch with or never gain access to the results the system makes possible.

Here’s why I love ZTD:

• It’s simple – I was using it within minutes
• It’s paper based – Yes! I get to use my fountain pen again
• I’m free to choose the paper, the notebook, or even not to choose one
• It’s efficient and promotes more in your work and life
• It’s a pleasure to use and to read

Here’s what I recommend..

• Subscribe to Zen Habits

• Get ZTD (at only $9.50 (US), it’s a superior value

Click here to view more details