Really god insights on how to live a truly more balanced life.

This is a book to help you know what is essential in your life - how to edit or pick from all the things going on in your life and find what is actually essential. It’s not just about saying no, but it’s about knowing what to invest our precious little time into and saying yes to those things. A theme it stressed multiple times is: if you don’t make your decisions about how you want to spend your time, someone else will do it for you. Not choosing is still a choice that will be made by someone else unless you actively choose. Some of the examples in the book I thought can’t necessarily work in every situation - like one man just took two years off work to study his passions in-depth, and there are not many who have the means to do that. Or examples about how men at work just told their bosses no to work tasks that arose, and I’d like to see what happened to a woman’s reputation or career if she did the same. Or a junior staff member. So sometimes, I didn’t think all the examples made a lot of sense. But there were a lot of other principles that did. It gave concrete ways to “say no” without saying no, what sort of things we should look for when prioritizing, and how we can start to figure that out personally. One favorite from the book was a recommendation from some of the world’s greatest minds. Instead of waking up and scrolling through our phones for 15-20 min (which we all seem to have time for), why not replace that time with reading something inspiring? Books on philosophy, religious texts, etc. It’s something I am going to try to start doing!