Prune

While there are best times to prune your plants, you can prune the clutter in your life anytime.

Scientists have shown that the main shoot dominates a plant's growth principally because it was there first, rather than due to its position at the top of the plant. The discovery helps explain why pruning encourages plants to thrive.

Likewise, one of your entrepreneurial habits should be periodic pruning, i.e. eliminating activities that are no longer interesting to you or a priority on your time.. More businesses die from indigestion than starvation. There is a lot to be said for the power of negative entrepreneurial thinking.

Pruning has several benefits:

1. Eliminating toxic people and projects
2. Stimulating growth in new projects or interests
3. Lessening the distraction of traction
4. It helps you focus on SCOPE
5. Giving you time to spend on a hobby or making new friends
6. Practicing creative boredom
7. It will make you a happy innovator
8. More time to write hand written notes to people who helped you
9. Practicing the entrepreneur's guide to fly fishing
10. Figure out the next things that will waste your time...wash, rinse, repeat pruning
11. It help startups get rid of your dead wood where you are no longer creating value.
12. Create a quit resume and post on LinkedIn
13. Do a "collaboration cleanse" This cleanse was inspired by research on the subtraction mindset, including our prior interventions at the Work Innovation Lab that helped people eliminate and redesign bad meetings. This research shows that people are prone to solving problems by heaping more complexity and burdens on themselves and others — even when subtraction is a more effective strategy. But prompting them to slow down and think about what they can and should remove from their work helps them overcome the instinct to add instead of subtract.

Start with using your compass. Then decide what trips your trigger, is in you sweet spot, your meaning, purpose, mission, ikigai or what puts some zip in your dood-da. Then prune everything else. Examples:

1. Eliminate LinkedIn contacts
2. Learn to say no
3. Don't buy more stuff you don't need
4. Stop downloads from social media sites and instant messenger
5. Put a free robocall blocker on your phone
6. Mute your phone between designated hours
7. Drive less
8. Review and eliminate unwanted subscriptions
9. Make 3 close friends
10. Read more
11. Unsubscribe from newsletters that no longer are relevant or interesting
12. Here some ways to practice subtraction at work
13. Relinquish rituals that no longer bring you joy.
14. Get toxic people and those that don't value you out of your life
15. Ladder your portfolio side gigs and eliminate those that are time sinks

Prune your main stem. If you don't, other branches won't sprout.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship