What is Essentialism? Definition, examples, strategies

Some 2,300 years ago, Aristotle proposed that every entity has an essence—an idea or form—that makes the thing what it is, and without which it would cease to be that kind of thing. This view came to be known as Essentialism in philosophy.

If you’re wondering what on earth a Greek philosopher’s musings have to do with running a tech business in the 21st century, read on.

Businesses too have an idea as its essence to make work meaningful: productivity. Whether it’s at the individual level or across an entire organization, productivity is about creating the highest value output from the resources you invest.

Sadly, in today’s world, busywork often masquerades as productivity. We’re constantly juggling tasks, running between meetings, responding to messages—all under the illusion that doing more will automatically lead to better outcomes. We rush from one task to the next without pausing to question whether any of it is truly meaningful.

But what if you could achieve more by doing less? What if the key to your success lay not in doing more tasks, but in focusing on the right ones?

This is Essentialism at work—an approach that champions doing less, but better to preserve the essence of productivity.

In this blog, we’ll break down what Essentialism is, why it matters in business, and how it can be applied to transform your company’s approach to everything from product development to customer support.

What is Essentialism?

Essentialism is the art of focusing on the vital few and eliminating the trivial many. In principle, it’s about choosing quality over quantity—aligning your time, energy, and resources with activities that support your core objectives and drive the most value. In a nutshell, Essentialism isn’t about doing more, but doing the right things.

This philosophy is eloquently outlined in Greg McKeown’s book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. McKeown explores how the relentless pursuit of more—more tasks, more responsibilities, more commitments—can derail our focus and dilute our impact. To lead a purposeful, fulfilling life and build a successful business, we must be disciplined in our choices and say no to the non-essential, so that we can make more room for the things that truly matter, he writes.

And this is backed by research. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that people are more likely to perform unimportant tasks with objectively lower payoffs over important tasks with better payoffs when the unimportant tasks are characterized merely by urgency or an illusion of expiration. Teams everywhere pursue urgency over importance, and this short-sightedness takes them nowhere.

So, implementing Essentialism in your business doesn’t just improve decision-making and productivity; it leads to better outcomes across the board. The shift from a culture of constant activity to a culture of deliberate focus is what separates high-performing teams from those that are just spinning their wheels.

Key principles of Essentialism you should know about

Essentialism is about focusing on what truly matters by eliminating the non-essential. It encourages doing fewer things but doing them better, emphasizing deliberate focus and disciplined prioritization. With these principles, companies can simplify processes, build impactful products, and create a focused, value-driven work culture.

Let’s delve into some of the principles McKeown lays out in his book and explore how they can be effectively applied to your business.

1. Essentialism principle 1: Less but better

Less but better is at the heart of Essentialism. It’s about focusing on the vital few things that drive impact rather than spreading your energy thin across a multitude of tasks that add little value. The idea is to choose quality over quantity, to make the few tasks you decide to do truly remarkable.

Imagine a product team overwhelmed with feature requests—each one seemingly important but not all critical to the core mission. Instead of saying yes to every customer’s request, they use Essentialism to sift through the noise. They decide to focus on enhancing the core functionality that makes their software irreplaceable.

By adopting the “less but better” mindset, this company builds a product that stands out—not because it has the most features, but because it solves the most pressing problem exceptionally well.

2. Essentialism principle 2: The disciplined pursuit of less

The disciplined pursuit of less means having the courage to say no to things that do not align with your goals, even when they seem appealing. McKeown emphasizes that the ability to say no is a superpower that frees you from the trap of trying to do everything. It’s about cutting out the non-essential to create space for the truly meaningful.

For instance, a customer support software company might be tempted to introduce gamification to their product because it’s the latest trend. But instead, they recognize that what customers really need is a more intuitive ticketing system that makes issue resolution quicker and ultimately boosts customer satisfaction.

It takes discipline to say no, especially in a competitive landscape, but by following the essentialist principle of prioritizing what truly matters, they turn their support tool into an industry standard.

3. Essentialism principle 3: Focus on the vital few

McKeown talks about separating the vital few from the trivial many—a principle that helps companies focus their resources where they will have the greatest impact. It’s not about doing everything that’s possible; it’s about zeroing in on the actions that make the most difference.

Consider a situation where the customer support team of a company receives hundreds of suggestions from clients for workflow automations. Instead of scattering their development team across all these initiatives, they decide to focus solely on automations that serve 80% of their customers, they create a product that’s easier to use and far more effective.

This focus doesn’t just benefit the end user. It simplifies the internal operations too—customer support has fewer unique issues to troubleshoot, sales teams can articulate value more clearly, and marketing can emphasize the core benefits without diluting the message. Focusing on the vital few has a ripple effect, impacting the product, the customer experience, and the entire organization.

4. Essentialism principle 4: Eliminate non-essentials to innovate

One of the powerful ideas McKeown emphasizes is that by eliminating non-essential activities, we create space for innovation and creativity. In a business-led world that’s obsessed with adding more—more features, more touchpoints, more everything—Essentialism is a bold strategy to do the opposite: to subtract until only what truly matters is left.

For teams, this could mean eliminating features that are seldom used or creating stricter criteria for new feature rollouts. Not only does this lead to a better product, but it also provides the space needed for developers to think creatively about how else they could add value—rather than just maintaining bloated features that offered little real benefit. Essentialism removes the noise, allowing innovation to flourish because the team isn’t consumed by busywork.

Why Essentialism matters in today’s AI era

In this era of generative AI, Essentialism isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity. It’s the key to cutting through the noise of endless tools, features, and data overload. By using AI to focus on the tasks and processes that truly matter, your business not only survives but thrives in the age of automation and hyper-connection.

We live in an age where AI is transforming everything from customer service to product development, and the temptation to do more is stronger than ever. Consider the explosion of AI tools—From AI-powered chatbots, predictive analytics to AI agents, businesses now have access to a suite of powerful tools.

But instead of using generative AI to streamline operations or improve customer interactions, many companies fall into the trap of overcomplicating their workflows with too many tools and overblown features. This can often lead to distraction and decision fatigue.

Essentialism teaches us to stop trying to do everything at once. When you embrace Essentialism, you use AI not to expand your workload, but to simplify and amplify what truly matters, like automating repetitive tasks, optimizing core processes, or unlocking insights from mountains of data.

For example, a SaaS company that focuses its AI efforts on improving customer experience by focusing its efforts on delivering a more personalized customer service will see greater returns than one that tries to offer a dozen AI features that customers don’t truly need.

The future of AI in customer service is not about bombarding customers with endless automated messages, chatbots that sound like robots, or features that no one asked for. Instead, it’s about focusing on what truly matters: personalized, efficient, and human-centered experiences.

What can be the benefits of Essentialism?

Essentialism offers a transformative approach for modern businesses. By focusing on high-impact activities, it drives productivity, enhances customer satisfaction, improves decision-making, and boosts employee engagement. Embracing the essence of less but better can strip away complexity, creating space for meaningful innovation.

Let’s zoom in a little on some of the major benefits you can get by adopting Essentialism:

1. Essentialism enhances focus and clarity

Essentialism brings with it an atmosphere of simplicity that emphasizes a “less is more” approach—not just in the product but also in the work culture. When teams reduce unnecessary communications, drop pointless meetings, and declutter digital workflows, what remains is crystal-clear purpose. This singular focus helps product teams improve not just how much they deliver, but how well they deliver on promises that matter to the end user.

Instead of diving headfirst into every feature request, successful teams take a moment to reflect on this question: Which features actually add value to the core mission of the product, and which ones are just cluttering the roadmap?

2. Essentialism increases overall productivity

Essentialism does not mean doing less for the sake of doing less. It means deliberately choosing to focus only on what will make the biggest impact. For companies building products, productivity isn’t about the number of features released; it’s about ensuring that each release is meaningful and directly tied to solving a key problem for customers.

A productivity boost can often start with a simple question: Does this task align with our primary goal? For example, imagine you receive numerous requests from clients asking for specialized, niche automations. Instead of catering to every individual demand, the essentialist approach is to identify automation features that will have the broadest impact—such as an enhanced workflow builder that works seamlessly with the most popular productivity platforms.

3. Essentialism improves customer satisfaction

At the core of Essentialism is a commitment to enhancing the experience and solving real problems. This is directly aligned with what customers seek—tools that make their life easier without unnecessary complexities. A simplified, streamlined product, developed with essentialist discipline, stands out from the noise of overstuffed software.

Take the example of a customer service automation platform aiming to deliver superior support experiences. By adopting Essentialism, the product team decides to refine their core ticket management system, ensuring it’s incredibly intuitive, fast, and offers intelligent automation based on customer needs. They resist the urge to add secondary features that don’t contribute to the core value of faster, efficient support resolution.

The result? Customers are happier because the platform does what they need—simply and effectively. Essentialism ensures that the customer journey is a smooth experience rather than an exercise in frustration. When you strip away the non-essential, what remains is something customers genuinely value and are willing to advocate for.

4. Essentialism ensures higher employee engagement

Put yourself in the shoes of a developer who’s drowning in a backlog of feature requests, bug fixes, endless meetings, and unnecessary administrative work. Now, imagine if instead of constantly switching gears and being overwhelmed, your workload is narrowed down to a few high-impact tasks that you’re genuinely excited about. That’s the power of Essentialism in driving employee satisfaction.

When team members are encouraged to focus on what truly matters, they start seeing their work as purposeful rather than just an endless stream of duties. The Essential Methodology advocates for creating an environment where employees are empowered to eliminate distractions and work on tasks that leverage their core strengths. This focus on fewer, better outcomes leads to a reduction in burnout and a more satisfied, loyal workforce that’s excited to contribute.

Challenges of adopting Essentialism for businesses

Essentialism helps businesses thrive by cutting out the non-essential, but implementing it can be challenging. Companies face obstacles like fear of missing out, resistance to change, and difficulty prioritizing the most impactful tasks. Overcoming these challenges is crucial to ensure that work delivers real value to customers.

The road to Essentialism isn’t paved with rose petals; it requires intentional changes that challenge ingrained habits. This change often brings resistance, as it means saying no to demands that previously fueled growth.

Here are some of the key challenges you might face while adopting the Essentialism philosophy of work:

1. Challenge 1: Fear of missing out (FOMO)

The fear of missing out (FOMO) is one of the most insidious challenges businesses face when trying to implement Essentialism. It’s the voice that asks, “If we don’t add that feature, will we lose customers to our competitors?”

This fear of being left behind leads to an ongoing cycle of feature bloat, where products become weighed down with features that are only occasionally used—or worse, never used at all. Sure, the product might look more impressive, but the user experience becomes more complex and harder to navigate. Instead of streamlining workflows and increasing productivity, the product ends up doing the opposite—overcomplicating the user experience with non-essential tools.

The result? Confused customers, frustrated teams, and a product that becomes harder to maintain, develop, and market.

This is where Essentialism shines. Instead of getting swept up in the FOMO of feature accumulation, a company focused on Essentialism will make a strategic decision to serve the vital needs of their core customer base. Embracing Essentialism allows businesses to focus on what matters, prioritize real value, and create products that don’t just keep up with the competition—they outshine it.

2. Challenge 2: Resistance to change

In every business, there’s an unspoken rule that more activity means more progress. This translates into more features, more updates, more everything. Adopting Essentialism means going against this ingrained culture. Team members initially resist the idea of slowing down—fearful that fewer updates might be perceived as stagnation.

Take, for instance, a product team introduces multiple new features every quarter—whether it’s new integrations, expanded reporting tools, minor user interface updates. The result? A product roadmap bloated with items that barely move the needle for the end users.

When the team adopts Essentialism, they focus on refining existing ones to enhance the user experience instead of adding features. They take a quarter to simplify the interface and introduce more effective, intuitive help resources based on customer feedback. The end result is a better product—one that is more elegant and user-friendly—and customers notice.

3. Challenge 3: Difficulty in prioritizing tasks

Prioritization can be deceptively simple in theory, but in reality, it’s where many businesses get stuck. The sheer number of stakeholders—each with their own set of priorities—can lead to fragmented decision-making. Marketing wants a new landing page feature, sales wants better integrations, product teams want to upgrade the user interface, and customers want the new feature they saw on a competitor’s platform. The noise can be deafening.

Essentialism advocates a structured approach to prioritization—one that involves ruthlessly filtering tasks based on impact. For businesses, this could mean aligning all teams with a singular, overarching question: Does this task directly improve our users’ experience with our core product?

This disciplined pursuit involves tough choices—but that’s where the power of Essentialism lies. By making prioritization a team-wide discipline, businesses can transform its product into one that delivers real, measurable value.

How to implement Essentialism in your everyday work

Essentialism is about achieving clarity by focusing on fewer, high-impact tasks that move the needle. By implementing Essentialism in your daily workflow, you can prioritize tasks that align with your core goals, eliminate unnecessary distractions, and build a culture of intentional focus. This results in developing impactful features, deepening customer relationships, and lasting results.

Implementing Essentialism requires more than just a shift in thinking—it demands a practical change in how you go about your day, how your teams function, and how you build products that solve genuine customer problems.

Let’s explore actionable strategies for adopting Essentialism into your everyday work.

1. Declutter your work environment and your focus

The first step toward Essentialism is to create a clean slate—a workspace and workflow free from unnecessary clutter, both physical and digital. This could mean restructuring the workday to eliminate unnecessary meetings and limit notifications that disrupt deep focus.

A development team might institute “focus blocks” during which they dive deep into core coding tasks, while non-urgent communications are put on hold. The goal is to be ruthless about distractions—each email, message, or request should be filtered with one question: Is this helping us achieve what’s most important right now?

Product teams could simplify their feature list, stripping back the elements that add complexity without true value. This allows developers and designers to focus on perfecting the core functionalities that help their customers manage projects effortlessly.

2. Start each day with intentional prioritization

In his book, McKeown stresses the importance of intentional prioritization—deciding what’s most important and committing to it. It’s the difference between merely reacting to the influx of emails and tasks that come your way versus taking deliberate action on the most meaningful activities.

Consider starting each workday with a powerful question: What’s the one thing I can do today that will make the most significant impact? This mindset can dramatically transform a product manager’s daily grind. Instead of juggling endless feature requests or attending every single meeting, they focus on the initiatives that align with the strategic vision—perhaps finalizing the requirements for a new automation feature that has been eagerly requested by multiple enterprise clients.

3. Eliminate the trivial and learn to say no

One of the most challenging aspects of Essentialism is learning how to say no. Essentialism highlights how companies have to make tough calls—turning away feature requests that didn’t align with their overarching mission of simplicity and clarity. This process of elimination is not a one-off task but an everyday discipline.

Here’s a scenario: Your sales team wants a highly customizable feature to cater to a few enterprise clients. Yet, the software development team realizes that building this would complicate the user experience for the majority of their customers. Instead of adding unnecessary bulk, they say no.

The courage to eliminate is key. By cutting out trivial work, you’re not just decluttering your roadmap—you’re giving your teams the time and mental space to do what truly matters.

4. Align team efforts with a unified essential mission

Essentialism doesn’t thrive in a vacuum. For it to succeed, everyone in the organization—from the development team to the marketing and customer success teams—must be aligned in their understanding of what is essential. Without this alignment, different departments can end up pulling in different directions, diluting efforts and increasing confusion.

If the goal is to enhance customer onboarding, every decision from feature updates to customer support strategies should reflect that mission. The marketing team can create educational content that eases onboarding, while product developers focus on simplifying the initial user setup flow.

By ensuring that every department and every team member understands and aligns with a unified essential mission, the entire organization moves as a cohesive unit toward impactful outcomes as the clarity of purpose propels every team member forward.

5. Protect the asset with ample rest and recovery

One of the most profound insights McKeown shares in Essentialism is the importance of protecting the asset—yourself. Essentialists know that burnout is the enemy of clarity, innovation, and productivity. This means intentionally designing workflows that allow for downtime and ensuring that work schedules aren’t built on unsustainable hustle.

For a SaaS company releasing a new product version, this might mean extending the timeline to ensure developers aren’t working back-to-back weekends or juggling too many deadlines. It’s about knowing that rest isn’t laziness—it’s what allows you to bring your best ideas to the table.

A company focusing on innovation doesn’t reach its peak by exhausting its workforce. Protecting the asset means your teams are rested, focused, and ready to channel their best selves into the tasks that truly matter.

Embrace Essentialism with the right platform

Research shows that 80% of employees report they have productivity anxiety—the feeling that there is always more that they should be doing at any given moment. No wonder then that the Wall Street Journal reports that employees of today are more dissatisfied with their work than they have ever been. Teams are running on empty, caught in the loop of endless to-do lists.

Essentialism is the antidote—offering a way to clear the chaos and focus on what truly matters. But to practice Essentialism effectively, you need the right tools to enable it, empower it, and sustain it.

The practice of the Essential Methodology is all about the “power of three”—being customer-centric, product-led, and AI-native. And to achieve that, teams need the right software that helps them to not just do more, but to do better.

Legacy platforms fail to align with these essentialist principles despite their sky-high claims. They promise clarity, but what they deliver is clutter. They claim to be AI-driven, but often their “solutions” are just retrofitted AI features that only add to the overall complexity, making teams juggle even more tools and dashboards. They talk about being customer-centric, but what they offer is more of the same—features that please no one but make products look good on paper.

Here’s where DevRev can make a real difference.

At DevRev, we believe in helping teams do fewer things, but do them better. We help you focus on what’s essential, cutting away the noise that keeps you from moving forward. We simplify, clarify, and amplify your work, allowing you to create real impact without the burden of distractions.

• DevRev is customer-centric to its core. You get a single unified platform where you can understand customer needs and put those needs front and center. It empowers your teams to respond thoughtfully rather than react hastily, ensuring every action taken aligns with customer value.
• We’re product-led. Every feature in DevRev is designed to improve what truly matters, ensuring your product vision stays clear and your roadmap is driven by purpose, not the whims of chasing the competition.
• DevRev is AI-native—not as an afterthought but by design. DevRev’s AI-native architecture comes with a smart knowledge graph that seamlessly integrates diverse data sources, ensuring up-to-date, contextual information for AI and human agents. This enables you to reduce the time spent on mundane tasks and amplify the time spent on tasks that matter.

If you’re ready to cut through the chaos and focus on what truly moves the needle for your team, book a demo with DevRev now and take the first step toward a more intentional, impactful future for your business.