Zen and the Art of Simple Living by Shunmyo Masuno — A Review

I picked this up at a point where I was running too many things simultaneously. Client work. Internal projects. The usual small business pressure of trying to be in too many conversations at once. I was not looking for philosophy. I was looking for relief.

Shunmyo Masuno is a Zen Buddhist monk and one of Japan's most celebrated garden designers. This is not a book about productivity. It's a book about the quality of attention. It changed how I think about the relationship between simplicity and clarity in ways that have directly affected how I work.

The 100 Practices

The book is structured as 100 short practices — none longer than two pages. Things like: eat breakfast before you look at your phone. Make your bed before you leave the room. Spend five minutes outside every day doing nothing. Keep one empty surface somewhere in your home.

These sound trivially simple. They are not. Most of them require you to make a choice about what matters before you encounter the morning's inputs. Which is the point.

Masuno's argument, stated quietly throughout the book, is that the modern problem isn't a shortage of productivity tools or personal organisation systems. It's a shortage of clarity about what's actually important. When you're clear on that, simple practices create space for everything else to fall into order. When you're not clear on it, no system helps.

The Zen way begins with tidying your surroundings. When the space around you is in order, the space within you follows.

The AI Overwhelm Connection

I think about this book a lot in the context of AI-assisted work. The promise of AI tools is efficiency — do more, faster, with less effort. And the tools deliver on that promise, mostly. But faster and more is only valuable if you're clear on what you're trying to achieve. Otherwise you just move faster toward the wrong destination.

The leaders I work with who are getting the most from AI are the ones who start with clarity about the problem they're solving, and then use AI to solve it more effectively. The ones who are most overwhelmed are the ones who've added AI to a workflow that was already unclear, and now they have a faster version of the same chaos.

The Practice That Changed Something

Wake up fifteen minutes earlier than you need to. Sit quietly with a cup of tea or coffee. Don't look at your phone. Do nothing. Just be with the morning.

I've done this more consistently since reading this book than any other change I've tried to make to my mornings. Not every day. Most days. And the days where I do it are structurally different from the ones where I don't in ways that I can't fully explain but no longer question.

Masuno doesn't mention AI. He wrote about a different kind of noise. But the underlying problem is the same: too many inputs, not enough intention. Some things don't need a mechanism to be true.