Prune Your Life!

I think we can all agree that distractions are generally a bad thing. They waste your time. They squander your energy. They exsanguinate your potential.

The worst part of it is, distractions are so easy to fall into and quite difficult to spot. In our increasingly digital world, they can be very hard to escape. This is why it’s important to employ a scorched earth policy when dealing with them.

Pruning is an agricultural technique that I am going to grossly oversimplify so I can make a point! Put very simply, pruning is where you take a fruit-bearing tree and cut off every branch that is dead, or even just doesn’t bear fruit. Sometimes it’s even a healthy branch that you just don’t want to grow fruit because it’s too short, or could harm the tree as it gets bigger.

The priorities for an apple farmer are: make apples, make bigger apples, and make more apples. So only the limbs with apples are important. The limbs are also cut in a pattern that makes it easier to collect the apples that grow. So the lesson is: know what’s important!

This means that anything that doesn’t contribute to the goal is pruned. Every single branch outside the plan is treated as expendable, if not detrimental. When you prune a branch it is cut off flush with the tree’s trunk so it doesn’t grow back. The lesson is: mercilessly remove distractions completely!

Lastly, trees grow very slowly; veeeeeery, veeeeeery sloooooowly. Pruning a tree properly starts early and takes years. This is not an overnight process and patience is a fundamental element of it. The last lesson is: be patient and stay committed for the long haul.

I hope this was both inspiring and empowering. I was going for inspiring and empowering. I want you to use this next week to try and identify 1 time wasting habit you could do without. Think of 3 ways you could cut this time-waster out of your life and do 1 of them.

What’s your worst distraction and how will you prune it? Tell me in the comments!