Simplifying your life is very popular idea nowadays. It’s been popularized, I think, by people like Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Work Week who pushes ideas like the 80/20 rule and the low-information diet, and Leo Babauta of Zen Habits in particular. Simplifying your life is good. No, it’s actually great and I believe everybody should have a go at it just to filter out some of the crap in their lives. Modern life is complicated and hectic enough without us blindly letting in and taking on board everything that comes our way.
But I’m afraid I’m going to be a little critical in this post. It’s time for a reality check about this whole simple living, minimal lifestyle movement that’s going on right now. Simplifying is not – I repeat, NOT – just about doing less.
Simplifying is about… well, simplifying. Nowhere in the dictionary does it say anything about cutting this out, removing that, stopping doing this, severing ties with those groups, cutting contact with those people, etc. Simplifying is about making things less complicated and complex. It’s about making things plainer and clearer. Yes, of course that sometimes means completely removing it from your life and doing less. But not always.
A year I jumped wholeheartedly onto the whole simplifying bandwagon. Having spent many a month in the busy-for-the-sake-of it mindset, I finally got a grip of myself and realized how much time and energy I was wasting on junk. What followed was what I call the purging of the irrelevant. A lot of day-to-day tasks disappeared during this time and a couple of hobbies that had long since passed their prime were ditched in favor of more valuable interests. It was all low value stuff and I was glad to be rid of it so I could focus on The Big Picture™.
A lot of those tasks revolved around this blog so I’m going to use that as an example (I understand that many of my readers probably aren’t bloggers but I hope you will still be able to appreciate and relate to the point I am trying to make). Mindless promotional activities that brought in an extra visitor or two if I was lucky, tedious maintenance jobs that barely benefited the site but made me feel happier because everything was kept neat and organized, those were the sort of tasks that I ditched. For six months or so things were better as a result. Running the blog wasn’t a chore anymore.
But then I realized something. The value of an activity isn’t always immediately apparent. It’s benefits aren’t always clear until further down the line. It turned out that those little promotional activities weren’t about those handful of visitors, but about having the blog in the spotlight regularly. Those little maintenace tasks like deleting spam and checking dead links weren’t about keeping everything tidy, but about making sure the blog gave off a positive impression on visitors. So rather than cutting them out completely I reinvented them, streamlined them and made them easier to do on a regular basis.
The next time you’re touched by the power of less and you’re tempted to simplify your life just remember that though a large part of it is about cutting stuff out, it can also just as easily be about streamlining how you do something, automating an activity, making it easier to do, replacing one thing with another, etc. Simplifying isn’t, ironically, always that simple.
October 26, 2009 at 10:54AM
I guess you could say simplifying consists of two separate components – eliminating the truly unnecessary and making everything else more efficient. Of course all of that is easier said than done.
Thanks for this post, I enjoyed it a lot!
October 26, 2009 at 06:24PM
You are so right! Simplifying by cutting out, or ignoring things doesn’t work. Getting good systems in place to do things more efficiently is what works. I teach things that many people might consider stupid – like how to clean your house fast and keep it that way, and how to eat healthy even if you’re busy. Just these two simple life skills make a big difference in how smoothly your life runs, and how you feel. So I can fully support what you’re saying here!
October 27, 2009 at 12:36AM
Simplify, minimize, do less, cut out the crap… I think all are open to individual interpretation. The key is not to defeat your purpose – why do you want to simplify? And what do you need to do to achieve it?
October 27, 2009 at 02:23PM
An interesting perspective. “The value of an activity isn’t always apparent” – this is a really fantastic point.
I’ve been simplifying for twenty years now and it comes naturally. In theory and not always in practice, I find that breaking things down into two groups helps – is this activity important and is it urgent? If you take care of the things that are important (to you) and NOT urgent than you will seldom have urgent issues to deal with, making your environment a little less intense and more enjoyable.
October 27, 2009 at 05:11PM
Hey James.
This was good to read. It’s nice to see the other end of the spectrum. You can only cut out so much before you have nothing left.
Streamlining sure does have a more valuable connotation, but it is not as flashy to talk about streamlining or optimizing, since those have been discussed a lot. One might say that automation is within the category of simplifying, but that is in a field all of its own.
I also agree with that message about how something you do that seems useless can be something you need to do to learn from, or that builds up future equity. We are usually glad when things surprise us in the future by being useful things to have done. There’s no need to cut out those types of activities.
One time I put in a lot of effort to get into the Technorati Top 10K, which I eventually did, and while it wasn’t worth much I have something to compare to from my past and I learned a lot from about blog promotion.
Thanks for this practical take on simplicity.
October 27, 2009 at 05:11PM
Stephen, you’re on target about breaking things down. I break tasks down into little bitesized tasks that I can complete in just a few minutes every day. I have the attention span of a gnat, and this way I can keep up with things without much thought. That’s what I meant when I said that systems are important. I’d never survive without my efficient systems in place.
And when you do what needs to be done when it needs to be done, you have a lot less crises to deal with! Makes life much calmer.
October 27, 2009 at 06:28PM
Great to read all the feedback so far and glad to see you all think I’m on the right track. I was worried I’d get some backlash from the Minimalists (just joking).
As Shane points out, I think it’s really about balancing between removing the truly unnecessary (not always easily identifiable) and streamlining the rest (a regular, ongoing process). When put like that it’s easy to think that achieving simplicity is anything but simple and in many ways that’s true… but it’s worth it in the long run.
October 27, 2009 at 07:03PM
Great post! I think there’s a lot to be said for minimizing/cutting out, but your point about automating and the like is well taken.
I’m reminded of a quote I’ve seen attributed to Oliver Weldell Holmes: “I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity” Simplifying is easy – simplifying the right thing in the right way, maybe not so much.
November 1, 2009 at 02:20AM
I think the whole key is to identify what’s important and what you should be doing and focus on that. Then find out the most productive and efficient way to achieve it! More often than not efficiency is simplicity.
November 9, 2009 at 01:48PM
James, you make me wonder what a Minimalists complaint would look like now. “Disagree” perhaps?