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If you have ever been around the entrepreneurial scene, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a lot of emphasis placed on things like boosting productivity, maximizing efficiency, and coming up with ways to streamline features of your professional life.

 However, you can also understand why the entrepreneurial aspect has placed so much importance on productivity. To make it clear, let us take an example of a production unit where you would need different machines and equipment to run the various parts of the system more efficiently. Like bulk bag fillers to get your product bagged, a conveyor belt system to make the movement of those bags streamlined and maybe even a code scanner to take automatic inventory of the bags ready for dispatch. With so much of the work done by technology, there is an increased productivity which reduced work hours. However, for a human, this would have been a much longer and tedious process.

You must however bear in mind that you don’t necessarily need to adopt too much of a “business-minded” perspective with regards to your personal life in general. There are definitely certain benefits to figuring out ways to streamline aspects of your everyday life nonetheless, whether that means researching topics such as how often to water a cactus and then buying one that requires less frequent care, or whether it means simplifying your goals and routines.

 

Here are just a few reasons why it can help to streamline some aspects of your everyday life.

 

  • Because time and attention are precious and finite resources

First things first: although we generally like to imagine that we have a more or less endless supply of time, and that we will always have enough energy and attention at hand to spend doing all the different things we want to do, the reality is unfortunately different.

 

Time and attention are precious and finite resources. Whenever you spend a couple of hours a day doing one thing, something else has to be either pushed into a smaller available portion of your total daily time, or it has to be abandoned.

 

Streamlining features of your everyday life can make you more “efficient,” which, in turn, can mean that you have more time and attention to spare for other things.

  • Because the more you spend your willpower on everyday chores, the less you will have for big tasks

In the field of psychology, there is a general consensus that willpower behaves in some ways like a muscle – and that the more we expend our willpower over the course of the day, the less we have available for other “willpower challenges” that come up.

 

Kelly McGonigal makes this argument in her book, “The Willpower Instinct,” for example.

 

One side effect of this phenomenon is that if it’s difficult and tedious for you to summon up the willpower to deal with the various chores and obligations you are confronted by every day, you’ll be more likely to give in to certain temptations, and less likely to be able to invest much willpower in things like hobby projects.

 

Streamlining your life can help to reduce the amount of willpower you need to expend on everyday things.

  • Because the modern world is full of complexity, and it’s necessary to simplify sometimes

In many ways, life today is better than was in the past. Very few people complain about modern medicine, for example.

 

At the same time, though, it’s also true that life today is increasingly full of complexity in a way in which it never was before.

 

There is evidence that when we have too many choices to make, and too many tasks to switch between, we can quickly end up being burned out and end up giving in to inaction.

 

Streamlining aspects of your everyday life is akin to simplifying – and in a world of growing complexity, it is often necessary to simplify.