As I approached my 30th birthday, I found myself reflecting deeply on the past 5 years of my life. On the surface, everything was going so well - my marriage was stronger, I had two beautiful children, I was more financially stable, and I was living in a nicer home. Even my professional skills in teaching, design, and business significantly improved. Yet, I was troubled by the fact that my day-to-day life wasn't necessarily any more fulfilling. What was the point of these improvements, of pursuing these values, if I didn't feel more satisfied and content in my daily life? I needed a way to get more value out of my values. So, I built the Essentialize app.
What is the Essentialize App?
Essentialize is an app that helps you organize your life based on your values. A value is anything you have or are pursuing that enhances your life and serves a meaningful purpose. Without it, your life would be worse in some regard. For example, think of the countless items in your home—furniture, clothes, gadgets, books, food, and so on. Each of these contributes to your wellbeing and make your life better. The people in your life and the activities you do with them are also values—they enrich your life (and if they don't, maybe you shouldn't hang out with them).
Organizing Your Values
You have thousands of values, and it's not obvious how to organize them. You might have really important values that you barely spend any time with, and others that aren't that important and yet you hyper-focus on them. An organized life is a prerequisite for a joyful life.
To organize your values, you need two things: categories, so you know where each value belongs, and a hierarchy, so you know how relevant they are. This is where the app provides guidance: in a simple onboarding process, you are asked to select the categories you want to focus on (these being health, relationships, career, finance, learning, spirituality, hobbies, and maintenance), and then to write up to three of the most important values in each.
The result looks something like this:
Relationships: Emily (my wife), Alice (my daughter), Chloe (my daughter)
Health: lift heavy at the gym, protein + creatine + electrolytes
Career: Essentialize app, write blog posts, talk to users
Learning: Learn to code, MBA at FGV, Y Combinator
Hobbies: Build Lego, listen to music
By going through the app’s onboarding, you are figuring out what is essential in your life, that is, you are essentializing (pun intended).
Now that you have a list of at most 15 items, ask yourself: which of these items generates the most energy, satisfaction, and wellbeing when I interact with them? The 3-5 values you select from this list are your key values.
What are Key Values?
Key values are a type of value that generate long-lasting wellbeing when you interact with them. Some values provide short-lived wellbeing. For example, eating an apple satisfies your hunger and supports your health, but the contribution to your wellbeing doesn't last long (three days after eating the apple you're not thinking to yourself "man, I'm so glad I ate that apple.") Even something as significant as earning an MBA might not provide lasting satisfaction during the process itself, despite its importance for your career. While completing the degree gives you a boost of wellbeing for a day or two, it too doesn't last long.
Interacting with a key value, on the other hand, makes you feel good the rest of the day, and perhaps even a few days after. One of my key values, for example, is to write blog posts (for the blog you're reading right now). When I engage with this value, i.e. I sit down first thing in the morning and work on writing the blog posts, I feel productive for the rest of the day. I might not do much else afterwards, but I still feel great. In contrast, on the days when I don't write yet do 300 different things, I don't feel productive by the end of it. I might have gotten a lot done, but those many things didn't contribute to my wellbeing.
Key values raise your overall wellbeing, putting you in a better mood, and making it easier to do everything else you want to do in life since you have the emotional disposition to do them. That’s why organizing your life based on key values is different from all the other organizational tools you may use, such as Google Calendar for appointments, a to-do list for tasks, or a journal for reflection. While these tools help organize different aspects of your life, Essentialize stands out by helping you align your activities with your values and focus on boosting your overall wellbeing.
Improve Your Life with Essentialize
With Essentialize, you are not just checking boxes when engaging with your key values. You are focusing on the specific values that generate long-lasting wellbeing. Life is not just about getting things done, it's also about deriving a sense of wellbeing from doing them.
You can download and test the app for free for iOS and Android. Any feedback you'd like to provide you can send directly to me at ricardo@essentializeapp.com.
Comments