The best advice I have is this: simplify.

If you don’t have any problems, you might not need this advice. That’s great! Otherwise, simplify.

You can reduce physical clutter in your physical environment. You can strip away the emotions from a decision that ultimately doesn’t require them. You can do less, slow down, and eliminate tasks, projects, and routines from your life.

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Like a lot of people, I can get lost in my phone.

I’ve noticed that this happens most often when I’m tired—first thing in the morning, late in the evening, or when I’m finishing up an onerous chore and wondering what to do next. The default “next” is to pick up my phone if I’m not being thoughtful about how I’m spending my time.

My phone—or any other quick source of dopamine— can easily mask what I really want. It can even make me forget what I wanted. In my pursuit of the short-term reward, the long-term gets lost. This may be a means of finding pleasure, but it’s no recipe for joy.

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When you look up something on Google Maps like a coffee shop or a gas station, the app will helpfully indicate how far away these local places are.

However, when you click on the listing, you realize that the actual travel distance is significantly greater. That’s because the app first gives you the distance “as the crow flies,” and you’re not a crow.

We get used to taking the long way to get places because we can’t fly and we don’t want to tromp through people’s backyards or ford rivers and streams to get to Starbucks. In fact, we accept that going somewhere really far away might require sitting in an airport for hours with no apparent progress toward our destination.

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Lots of school assignments are just for show.

Even assignments with a legitimate objective will often be padded out with superfluous tasks to make them seem more interesting, substantial, or fun. But often, it just makes them take longer.

That’s how a first-grader finds herself doing an addition worksheet that requires, for instance, coloring each box based on the sum in order to create a picture of a flower.

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When a kid cleans her room, she may use some unorthodox tidying tactics.

Theoretically, everything should find a home where it is grouped with like items. However, there isn’t always time and energy for that. Shoving everything into drawers and closets, while hasty and perfunctory, is actually a good start. At least the room looks tidy. The details can be addressed later.

There are many situations in school, work, and life where we get stuck because we want to to do things well. We might spend hours, days, or even years trying to summon the energy to approach our task the right way. In the meantime, the deed remains undone. If we give ourselves permission to take the easy way out — to do the work badly or take shortcuts — we may actually accomplish what we set out to do.

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