Simplicity

I often seek to simplify my surroundings, things, services and software. Keeping things simple and tidy helps me focus on the things that matter. That’s the idea at least. The paradox is that if you don’t simplify properly, it can be counterproductive and add more complexity to your life. I have experienced this often. I’m at it again, but this time I’m going to make some tough decisions and cut the crap.

In my world, the software that I use is very central. I work with software full-time every day, so this is an area in life where I’ve tried to simplify a lot. As I haven’t been fully conscious in my efforts, I have instead been left with many more different pieces of software to manage than before. You see when I been test new simpler software, I really like it, but at the same time I find it hard to let the old one go because of some nice features, so I end up with both. And that’s a paradox in practice. If your not willing to make a decision and compromise, then simplification will only waste your time and leave you in a worse mess than before.

There are basically two ways to go when doing simplification: going all in, or the pragmatic way. Going all in is simplification above all. For software this will mean loosing some complex features in trade for the greater simplicity, it also means deleting the stuff you decide is superflous, throwing away basically.

But what is it really, simplification? In my use of the word, we’re talking a wide definition of the word. I want everything to become simpler, more minimalist if you will. If I have two mail addresses, one would be simpler. If I have three blogs, one would be simpler. If I need to switch between Chrome and Safari to view all the web pages I use, Firefox would be simpler (sorry, I had to). If I drive a car to work, biking would be simpler! The car is extremely complex. In some way I’m on the edge of talking about frugality and minimalism here, but hey, frugality and minimalism is simpler than the opposite. As you may have understood, it’s not so much simple as in easy, however, the ease comes with time. When you get less distracted, things get easier.

It takes time. As you have to shave away shit you don’t use, and stick with your decision for it to have any effect, you need to spend some time thinking and testing your options. Do one thing at the time! Example: I’ve been trying to use two monitors for a while. I thought the added screen space would increase my productivity. I was wrong. The stuff on the right hand screen is distracting me from the left hand screen, and vice versa! So today I replaced my right hand monitor with pen and paper. I’m excited to see the long term effects of this, because today was a very productive day. It’s also simpler to plug in one monitor instead of two. Less is more.

I’ve already made a decision when it comes to web browsing: I use Firefox for everything. It’s actually not a simpler browser than the others – but it’s the only browser that does all I need in one package (on mac).

More importantly is a decision I made regarding which technologies I use at work vs. for private projects. I have long been sticking to Ruby on Rails for web development since that’s what I started with. At work I’ve been using Java with Spring. I have now made the decision to ditch Rails for private projects in favor of Spring! This is seriously scary shit for a hipster wannabe developer like me! HOWEVER. It’s not that I don’t like Ruby or Rails any more. It’s great! No, I just happen to like simplicity and focus even more! I want to be seriously good at what I do. Keeping up with both Rails and Spring is quite heavy for one guy with very little spare time and a bunch of projects. It adds complexity and forces me to spend more time on learning than on creating new software. I’ve been chewing on this one for a long, long time, and it feels right. As soon as made the decision I started enjoying Java and Spring much, much more than before. That’s the beauty of simplicity, once you move the clutter away, you see the beauty of the few things left. Constraints sparks creativity too, and simplicity is actually not much more than constraints.

Another positive thing about simplicity, is that simpler solutions tend to be cheaper than the complex ones. You pay for extra functionality. You actually pay for distraction, reduced creativity and the hiding beuaty! Sometimes you may have two different subscriptions giving you almost the same service. Merging services usually reduce both cost and complexity. But focusing on one service also makes that one service more beautiful to you, as you get to spend more time with it and get to know it inside out. Whenever you have two almost equal services you compare them, they never fulfill all your requests and they both become ugly. The individually beautiful services I’m thinking of now is Bitbucket vs. Github. I will probably do the same here as with Rails vs. Spring, choose one of them because it’s used by my employer, and get to know it really well – and save some money in the process.

This turned out a bit longer and more poetic than I anticipated, but it just flows out of me.

Let me know how you made your life simpler!