Embracing Minimalism in Daily Life

The Suitcase That Changed Everything

My grandmother owned three dresses for church, a cast-iron pot, and a wooden comb. She raised six children in a two-room house on an island so small it doesn’t appear on most world maps. She was also, by every measure I now understand, the most uncluttered thinker I have ever known.

I thought about her the day I stood inside a 900-square-foot storage unit in Geneva — the kind you rent when your apartment can no longer absorb your ambitions — surrounded by nine years of accumulated professional life. A treadmill I hadn’t touched. Conference tote bags from four continents. Three versions of the same laptop stand. A label-maker, still in its box.

The storage unit smelled of cardboard and mild defeat.

That afternoon, a colleague in Johannesburg sent me a photo of her new flat: white walls, a low table, two chairs, a single framed print. “Finally,” she wrote. “Room to think.”

Room to think. I have been chasing those three words ever since.

Minimalism Is Not an Aesthetic. It Is a Decision.

There is a version of minimalism sold to us on Pinterest — grey linen, artisanal candles, conspicuously empty shelves. That is interior design. Useful, perhaps. But not what I mean.

The minimalism I am interested in is the practice of asking: what is actually necessary here?

On the island where I grew up, this was not philosophy. It was logistics. Shipping costs money. Space is finite. You learn early that everything you bring onto a small island must justify its passage. That question — does this earn its place? — turns out to be one of the most clarifying questions you can carry into a career.

I have sat in meetings in Nairobi, Pretoria, and Addis Ababa where the agenda contained eleven items and the room left decisions on none of them. I have reviewed presentations with forty-seven slides that were really making one point. I have worked inside organisations that had six layers of approval for a decision that two people could have made on a Tuesday afternoon.

Minimalism, applied professionally, is the discipline of cutting to the one thing that actually matters.

“Does this earn its place?” — the most clarifying question you can carry into any boardroom.

The Cost of Accumulation Nobody Talks About

Here is what no productivity book tells you: complexity has a maintenance fee.

Every subscription you keep paying for but don’t use. Every project that stays on your list because you haven’t said no. Every relationship — professional or personal — you tend out of obligation rather than genuine value. These things do not simply sit there passively. They draw on your attention budget every single day.

Researchers studying decision fatigue have documented these effects for decades. The more unresolved choices and open loops you carry, the worse your judgment gets by afternoon. Executives at some of the world’s most pressured companies have spoken publicly about wearing near-identical clothes each day for exactly this reason. It may sound eccentric at first, but once you trace the logic, it becomes clear.

My version: I now keep my email down to one screen. I have three ongoing professional priorities at any given time, not twelve. I end every Friday by writing down what I am deliberately not doing the following week. That list is often more important than the to-do list.

A director I worked with in Antananarivo had a phrase she used whenever a meeting agenda arrived with more than five items: “We are not deciding anything here.” She was almost always right. We would reschedule with three items, a decision-maker in the room, and a hard stop. Work got done. People went home.

What the Island Taught Me That the MBA Didn’t

In business school, accumulation is rewarded. More credentials. More connections. More markets entered. More product lines extended. Growth is directional, and the direction is always more.

The island had a different lesson. When a storm comes — and storms always come — the question is what you can afford to lose. The families that fared best had fewer members. They were the ones who knew, with precision, what they needed.

I think about this whenever I counsel younger professionals. In your twenties, accumulation makes sense: skills, experiences, relationships, perspectives. Gather broadly. But at some point — usually somewhere in your thirties, though it varies — you start to need a different skill entirely. The skill of letting go without losing ground.

I have watched talented people in Africa, Europe and at the United Nations stall professionally, not because they lacked capability, but because they could not stop adding. Another initiative. Another side project. Another committee. They were always too distracted to go deep into anything.

Depth requires constraint. Constraint is a choice. That choice has a name.

Practical Minimalism for People Who Have Mortgages and Monday Meetings

I am not suggesting you sell your belongings and move to a monastery. I live in the world. I have a family, a mortgage, and a colour-coded calendar that occasionally embarrasses me.

But here are three practices I have kept for the past eight years, across three countries and two job changes, that have genuinely improved how I work:

One: The single-page rule. Every project I own must fit its core logic on one page. If I cannot explain what I am doing, why it matters, and what success looks like in one page, I do not understand it well enough yet.

Two: The subtraction review. Quarterly, I ask myself, ‘What am I doing that produces the least return for the most effort?’ I removed one thing. Every quarter. Without replacement.

Three: Protected mornings. Before I open email, before I check notifications, I have sixty minutes. That time belongs to whatever requires my best thinking. Not my most urgent thinking. My best. The difference is significant.

None of these are dramatic. All of them compound.

Room to Think

I eventually cleared the storage unit. It took a weekend and a decision that I had been postponing for two years. Most of what I kept fit in one carload.

I do not miss any of it.

My grandmother, who never owned a storage unit and who lived most of her life on 155 square kilometres of volcanic rock surrounded by open ocean, had a way of saying things that still stop me cold when I remember them. “The ocean,” she told me once, “is not empty. It is just very clear about what it holds.”

Minimalism is not emptiness. It is clarity. And in a world that profits from your distraction, clarity is one of the most subversive things you can practice.