@JamesClear tweeted this today:

_5 things to consider removing next year:

-one toxic person
-one annoying customer
-one topic that robs your attention
-one belief that’s holding you back
-one commitment that isn’t worth the effort

You don’t have to add things to your life to improve it._

I love how easy he frames it for us. Just remove one tiny thing. It doesn’t have to be “throw your phone away, cast everything aside and live like a hermit” dramatic. Just one thing. Just 1% (or even less) from your social relationships, work, media consumption, personal narrative, to-do list. 

It reminds me of the antifragile strategy of “via negativa” espoused by Nassim Taleb. Subtraction can add more to our lives than addition. We’re addicted to additive analysis and acts of commission, and it might not always help. Sometimes it might even be counter-productive, because we over-compensate. 

Acts of omission, via negativa, helps to simplify life too. It’s like spring-cleaning. In fact, one of writers whom I admire, said it’s the path to perfection: 

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I love the strategy of via negativa since reading it in Antifragile, but never took a moment to put it into practice. A practical implementation tool of via negativa is probably the NOT-to-do list, or a blacklist of people, things, tasks, events, beliefs, ideas that I set out to practice to omit from my life. 

It’s the 99% mark of 2019 today, and what better way to spend the final 1% thinking about what I will remove in 2020 and the whole of the 2020s ahead. I think I’ll use this list below:

• Things - give away or discard things (material/digital) which I might have developed an unhealthy dependence on
• People/relationships - avoid or ghost toxic family, friends, customers, online individuals, chat groups, communities
• Tasks - drop toxic tasks, actions or behaviours in work or personal life
• Events - not schedule appointments, commitments, events and social gatherings in work and personal life
• Beliefs - create habit system to give up a personal belief, narrative or bias that I keep hitting up against and is holding me back from progress

So, what will you remove in 2020?