5 Important Reasons Why Minimalism Can Benefit Your Life

How This New Paradigm Can Improve Your Effectiveness and Your Results

4 min readJan 28, 2020

Minimalism can benefit your life when done with the right intention and adopted as a daily practice.

A growing number of leaders or working professionals are adopting minimalism practices to achieve their goals faster.

What is Minimalism?

While living with less is part of minimalism, it’s only a small part. Minimalism is not only about eliminating things and living a simple life.

The real focus of minimalism is being intentional about what you give your attention to. It’s about knowing your priorities and removing things that affect your capacity to give attention to those priorities.

The objective of adopting minimalism practices is to improve your ability to focus on what you consider important. If you do, you will experience an improvement in your effectiveness and your results.

Minimalism as a New Way of Living

Most people can simplify their lives. The more things and commitments someone has, the harder it becomes to focus on other priorities.

Things I have done to adopt minimalism practices include:

Reducing the number of goals I focus on every year.
Eliminating unproductive social meetings or events.
Reducing decisions I need to make daily by implementing new systems.
Following a plan or schedule to keep track of my priorities.
Using technology to automate processes.

If minimalism becomes a way of living, distractions are eliminated, which helps prioritise time, energy and resources.

5 Reasons Why Minimalism Can Benefit Your Life

The practice of minimalism has many advantages. Here are five reasons why minimalism can benefit your life, which may inspire you to try it out.

You will improve the quality of output. Since you will focus on quality instead of quantity, what you produce will improve. Better quality can lead to new opportunities. This means the chances of achieving new or bigger goals will also improve.
You will use your resources better. When you have less to work with, you will become more resourceful. This means you will place a higher value on your time and what you give your attention to.
You will reduce decision fatigue. Dealing with fewer things eliminates confusion. This means you will not feel scattered as the need to make decisions daily will decrease. Fewer decisions will allow you to focus better on what you are doing.
You will experience less stress or mental turmoil. Whenever you have too many things going on, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, discouraged and unmotivated. Minimalism will help reduce feelings of being out of control and also allow you to concentrate better.
You will find more joy doing the work you do. Minimalism will increase your progress towards what you want. Progress leads to a sense of accomplishment, which will generate joy when working. That will also boost your motivation, which means you will continue to increase your progress.

Final Thoughts

Minimalism should not be regarded as a fad that will give way to something new and better. If adopted for the right reasons and done consistently, it will give you a new outlook and approach to life.

While minimalism may not be for everyone, the downside of not adopting it is, you have a greater chance of getting affected by your everyday responsibilities. That can affect your health, relationships, finances, and mental and emotional health.

Action Step: Choose one thing you can do to adopt minimalism practices. Perhaps there is something that is not adding to your life, that you can eliminate now. Or it can be something you want to add that will allow you to focus better on what’s most important.

Question: What are other important reasons why minimalism can benefit your life?