Entrepreneurs have a ton on their plates – both at home and in the office.

Wouldn’t it be nice to find a way to optimize, automate, & outsource your tasks (both at work & at home) to make more time for the better things in life?

This is the concept behind productivity expert Ari Meisel’s book “Less Doing, More Living: Make Everything in Life Easier”

If there’s one thing I appreciate about a book on efficiency, it’s brevity, and in under 100 pages, Ari Meisel’s provides you with a firehose of information designed to simplify your life.

About Ari Meisel

Ari Meisel was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at a pretty young age.  Medication wasn’t improving his health or making him feel any better.  Instead of focusing on medicine, Ari designed to make life-altering decisions to improve his health by working smarter not harder.  Through tedious self-experimentation and documentation, Ari overcame the need for prescription drugs by implementing many of the efficiency strategies explained in this book.

Simply put, it’s about utilizing today’s technologies to automate basic day to day tasks so you can have a better balance in life.

3 Keys to Efficiency

Meisel’s 3 keys to becoming more efficient in life revolve around optimization, automation, and outsourcing.

1.  To optimize workload, Ari suggests breaking each task down to the bare minimum requirements.  After that, as you’d expect an efficiency expert to suggestion, he wants you to simplify the process and eliminate any unnecessary processes.
2. Once optimized, the next step is to automate.  A large portion of this book is dedicated to listing out apps and website that Ari himself uses to get many of these tasks completed without utilizing any human capital.
3. The final step is to outsource the remaining tasks that cannot be automated to a virtual assistant.

Big Takeaway For Me

While I’ve heard much of this advice before related to worklife, I’ve never heard it described so much in personal life before.  For example, he dedicates a chapter to the elimination of running personal errands!  He talks about using Amazon Subscribe & Save – a subscription service that allows you to set up standard repeat orders of non-perishable items.  Then, for those items that can’t be automated, he suggests using outsourcing services like TaskRabbit to fulfill.  I’ve never thought about optimizing and automating so much of my personal life and am excited to give this a try.

Conclusion of Less Doing More Living

In the book, Ari says that his mission is to ‘“make it so that you never feel guilty about doing the things you want to do because you should be doing something else.” I love this concept – however, I’m not sure if I could actually optimize my personal & professional life to the extent that he has.  But Ari does a great job of explaining what he does, how he does it, in a manner that epitomizes him best – efficiently.  In about 100 pages, this is a book I suggest you read – even if you only implement a few efficiencies, it can truly improve your life.