Monday memo #57
Create emptiness.
The Monday memo is food for thought to fuel your week.
Hi everyone,
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Monday memo.
Have you ever said, to yourself or someone else, “I’d really love to do that, but I just don’t have the time?” I’m sure you can remember a time when you were younger and time seemed to stretch out forever. Where did all that time go?
Your life is made up of days, and while every day is different, a big part of every day is filled with routines. Wake up, brush your teeth, make a coffee… whatever your routines happen to be, over time they become habits, things you do without thinking.
Habits can be good things that serve you, or bad things that ensnare and enslave you. Whatever they are, they take up a good amount of time, and every time you add a new daily habit, you take a little bit of flexibility out of your day. If you’re not careful you can fill up your entire day with habits and routines, until your days are so full, you don’t have time for anything else.
In other words, there are only so many hours in the day, only so much room for routines. And when your days are packed with routine, you don’t have room left for learning and growth.
Imagine that the minutes and hours of your day are like the shelves in a convenience store. An owner of a convenience store has to decide what to stock. There’s only so much room on the shelves, right? How do they decide what to put on the shelves? Your day is kind of like that convenience store, and your clock and your calendar are like the shelves. What do you fill your time with?
There’s a reason I’m making this analogy. When I was working on my book, The Connected Company, I learned about a unique approach to this problem, taken by 7-Eleven in Japan, which is also a way you can think about your daily routines, and make room for learning and growth.
Most convenience stores do a lot of sophisticated analysis to decide what to put in their shelves. But what 7-Eleven Japan realized was that there was always more merchandise available than could ever fit on the shelves — an endless line of companies with products, who wanted nothing more than to have their stuff on a shelf at 7-Eleven. And a typical Japanese 7-Eleven store only had room for 3,000 items.
So rather than try to figure out what would sell best through analysis, they simply focused on creating empty space on the shelves, to create opportunities for new products. On a regular basis, they would remove the worst-selling items from their stores to make room for new stuff. And they would fill that space with new things that they had never had before. And every week, they would drop the worst performers to make room for new items.
In this way they turned every store into a continuous ongoing experiment. Although 7-Eleven Japan was originally a franchise of the US-based company, this approach was so successful that it bought out the US parent company and today, 7-Eleven Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of 7-Eleven Japan!
You can take the same approach to your daily routines, turning your days and weeks into an ongoing continuous experiment focused on improving your quality of life.
Exercise.
Here’s your exercise for the week: Create emptiness.
List out your daily and weekly habits and routines. Consider which ones are serving you best, which contribute the most to your happiness, and which serve you the least. Think about the things that take up time without giving you value back in return. Are there habits and routines in your life that you can eliminate?
Don’t worry about how to fill the time. There will always be demands on your time. There will always be opportunities that come up. Clear out the time-shelves. Sweep away the habits and routines that are not serving you.
Make space. Create emptiness. See what happens.
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If you’re already a member, thank you. You’re making this possible, and your membership is what gives me the confidence and encouragement to keep going.
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