The real pandemic? Majoring in minor activities

 

“You can do anything, but not everything.”Greg McKeown wrote that. Most of us nodded, bookmarked it, and went back to doing everything.

 

Most of us wake up today with multiple browser tabs open, upmteen unread WhatsApp groups demanding our urgent non-urgency, a calendar that looks like a game of Tetris gone wrong — and somewhere in the chaos, the nagging sense that despite all this magnificent activity, nothing of real consequence actually moved.

 

The Busy Trap Has A Waiting List

In 2004, when South Korean shipbuilder Hyundai Heavy Industries was haemorrhaging efficiency, consultants discovered their engineers spent 40% of their day in meetings — about meetings. Not building ships. Discussing the building of ships. About ships. That weren’t being built.

 

Question: If you removed 60% of what filled your day today — would anything important break? Or would everything important finally breathe?

 

The Essentialism Audit That We Are Reluctant To Conduct

McKeown’s central provocation in his seminal book Essentialism is deceptively surgical: most people have confused being busy with being productive, and productivity with progress. Three different countries. Most of us live in all three simultaneously and call it ambition.

 

Japan’s ‘Karoshi’ warning: The Japanese coined a word — karoshi — for death by overwork. Not death from the important work. Death from the accumulation of the trivial dressed in urgent clothing, worked at terminal velocity.

 

The Dutch ‘Niksen’ revolution: The Netherlands quietly reintroduced niksen — the deliberate art of doing nothing — as a productivity strategy. Companies reported innovation spikes. Because stillness, it turns out, is where the essential hides.

 

Welcome to the art of Majoring in Minor Activities — a phrase Greg McKeown dropped like a grenade in his landmark book Essentialism, the kind of line that makes you laugh, wince, and quietly avoid eye contact with yourself in the mirror.

 

The Highlight Reel Is A Distraction Reel In Disguise

 

Minor activities don’t feel minor while you’re in them. They arrive dressed in urgency, with polished subject lines and someone’s deadline attached. A report that changes nothing. A meeting that produces another meeting. A presentation for an audience who already decided. All of it mortgaging your one non-renewable resource: attention.

 

The ISRO counterpoint: When K. Sivan led India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission, his team operated on a radical principle — fewer people in the room, cleaner decisions, faster movement. ISRO famously does more with less because its culture has no appetite for performative busyness. It only respects results that orbit planets.

 

The Relentless Geometry Of One Thing

Warren Buffett — a man who could own any calendar — reportedly reads for six hours a day. Not emails. Not Slack. Books. Analysis. Depth. He calls this “sitting and thinking” his most productive work. Meanwhile, most CEOs can’t protect a single uninterrupted hour.

 

The Ubuntu Wisdom

A South African philosophy offers ubuntu– “I am because we are” — but its lesser-known cousin is the council practice of the Xhosa elders: only speak when you have something that improves upon silence. Radical. Transferable. Immediately applicable to your next team meeting.

 

What if the single most powerful question you could ask every morning was not “What do I need to do today?” but “What is the ONE thing that, if done well, makes everything else easier or unnecessary?”

 

The World’s Most Productive Idiot

 

We’ve all met the “Productive Idiot.” No, it’s not an oxymoron. It’s the person who organizes the office party, creates a flawless Excel sheet for the lunch rotation, and replies to every WhatsApp group message with a “noted with thanks.” They are hyper-efficient machines of irrelevance.

We have a cultural allergy to “wasting time.” So we fill the void with motion. We attend meetings just to prove we were there. We respond to emails to clear the inbox, not to move the needle. We are the world champions of the “Checklist Mentality“—ticking boxes while the ship heads toward the iceberg.

 

The Art Of Sovereign Neglect

Let’s look at those who refused to major in minors:-

 

The Case of the Norwegian “Slow TV”:While the world is busy making 15-second reels, Norway spent hours broadcasting live, unedited footage of a fireplace burning, or a ship sailing slowly. It sounds insane. But it was a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of frantic content. They majored in depth, in patience. They understood that to connect with a nation, you don’t need flashy edits; you need presence.

The Steve Jobs “One-Thing” Pivot:We romanticize Jobs for his vision, but his real superpower was his scalpel. When he returned to Apple, he didn’t add products; he subtracted them. He killed dozens of projects (minor activities) to focus on the iMac. The hardest thing in business isn’t finding things to do; it’s finding things to stop doing.

 

The Indian Exception: The Dabbawala’s Narrow Focus

We don’t need to look West for inspiration. Look at Mumbai’s Dabbawalas. They operate with a Six Sigma efficiency that would make a German engineer blush. Their secret? They don’t try to deliver couriers. They don’t diversify into logistics. They say “no” to everything except the Tiffin. They have the narrowest aperture of focus in the world. They have realized that delivering lunch is not a minor activity—it is the only activity. They don’t get distracted by the shiny objects of “growth” and “scaling.” They just get the damn box to the office on time.

 

The Email Vortex: When Inbox Zero Becomes Your Life Sentence

Ever wonder why Einstein doodled relativity on napkins while his peers drowned in memos? He ignored 99% of incoming mail. Fast-forward to India: Ritesh Agarwal, OYO‘s chaiwallah dropout billionaire, deletes 90% of emails unread. “Noise is the new poverty,” he quips. What if your inbox is a black hole sucking your genius?

 

Science backs it—psychologist Barry Schwartz’s “paradox of choice“ shows decision fatigue from trivia shreds focus. Ditch the vortex. Actionable twist: Invent the “Agarwal Audit“—scan emails for one word: essential. No? Archive. Watch your empire emerge from the delete key.

 

The Seduction of the Minor

Minor activities are addictive because they come with instant gratification.

 

Tick a box.
Send a mail.
Attend a call.
Feel productive.

 

But the big stuff?
Building a brand. Creating original thinking. Making something that lasts?

 

That’s uncomfortable. Slow. Uncertain.
It doesn’t give you dopamine. It demands discipline.

So we escape into the small.

 

Actionable (But Not Obvious) Ways to Stop Majoring in Minor Activities

1. Conduct a “Funeral Test” on Your Work
If this task disappeared tomorrow, would anyone outside your immediate team care?

If the answer is no… you’ve found a minor activity in the wild.

 

2. Schedule “Non-Negotiable Thinking Time” Like a Board Meeting
Not brainstorming. Not ideation.

Thinking.

The kind where you stare at a wall and wrestle with uncomfortable questions.
That’s where major work begins.

 

3. Replace “Urgent” with “Impact” as Your Filter
Urgent is loud.
Impact is quiet.

Train yourself to respond to the quiet.

 

4. Kill One Thing Daily That Feels Productive but Isn’t
Not delegate. Not postpone.

Kill.

Watch how quickly your calendar starts breathing again.

 

5. Build a “Stop Doing” List
Everyone has a to-do list.

Very few have a stop-doing list.

That’s where strategic clarity lives.

 

In Closing

You don’t drift into meaningful work.

You fight your way into it.

Against noise.
Against expectations.
Against your own addiction to looking busy.

At the end of the year, nobody remembers how many meetings you attended.

They remember what changed because you showed up.

So the next time you’re about to open another deck, schedule another call, or respond to another “just circling back” email…

Pause.

And ask yourself:

Am I doing work that matters…
or am I just brilliantly busy?

 

PS: On a completely different note,I am delighted to share that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

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