Relentlessly Simplify
den.dev
den.dev
What they have in common is relentless and flexible thinking about their subject(s) of interest, not, like, really nice sound systems.
That's not to say that minimalism doesn't work for some, but I don't think all this meta stuff matters much. And I'd like to see some evidence from sorts of people who write about how great minimalism is that it does.
There's a difference between messy and full. My office is very full, but there is very little waste - I don't keep broken parts (I salvage bits immediately), I keep everything organized in ready-to-go-kits (the hiking pack just needs snacks and water added, my computer repair kit is kept well stocked, my electronics box is organized and all labeled).
I don't think minimalism is necessary (though it can be useful for some) but some order (whatever works for you, personally) is very important. But this is a personal thing - one persons carefully cataloged desk is someone else's trash pile.
This bothered me briefly until I realized that if this was the case I'd rather have a messy desk than an empty desk ;-)
Other caveats include children and pets. With some kids and some pets, it doesn't matter how much money you have and how tidy you are by habit.
If you are working class you may have a sewing table full of half-finished repair jobs. If you are rich, you either buy new clothes whenever you want, or you offload that work onto a tailor.
If you are working class your dirty clothes may pile up, and you need an ironing board and maybe a clothesline. If you are rich, you use the dry cleaners.
If you are poor your dishes pile up because you cook meals frequently, and you may not even own a dishwasher. If you are rich, you may eat out frequently and certainly can afford a dishwasher.
There are poor (but content) people who are very minimalist. They don't need to hoard not because they "can afford to buy or rent exactly what you want precisely when you want it", but because they don't want much, period.
There's probably a happy middle ground somewhere in between.
Our boss was a neat and tidy sort who kept his desk completely spotless. Nothing on it but a laptop. One day he came up and said "You know they say that a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind."
Ben didn't miss a beat and asked "Well Rob, if that's true, what is an empty desk a sign of?"
I think that's just most people in general tbh
"When I think about the successful, interesting people I have known in my life, they all have garbage in their houses."
In other words, perhaps complexity is an unavoidable byproduct of productivity, but the successful keep it under a manageable threshold.
A lot more come up than you would think.
The most uprising example to me was Michael Bloomberg. Apparently he refuses to have more than 6 pairs of shoes. I don't even know how to take that, because he must have more than 6 homes, right?
Personally, I've never understood people who have dozens of shoes. Though I also own 6 mechanical keyboards with one pair of hands so I'm just as bad :)
I remember being in a circle of friends with a famous pop star. For a famous guy who was supposedly partying a lot, he hated going out. He hated to meet people. He worked really hard on his projects (an album, a tour, the vidoes etc).
He wasn't particularly interesting, or interested, in socializing with new people, though he spent a little time with his family, and his girlfriend.
Actually, you probably all know successful people. They just work a lot with a single minded focus. It is not the same as being interesting.
Perhaps the minimalist person would have completely finished books, papers, tools and so on, and maybe they would not be interesting to hang out with.
So rather than being minimalists, they avoid adding to their existing pile/s whenever possible. I can do this much and no more; they know their productive limits and seek to stay within those.
Routinizing your diet can bear more useful fruit than anything else. First prioritize ease of preparation, then taste and enjoyment, then health. Doing it in that order makes the subsequent steps a million times easier.
At work, I would go out to eat every day. They clean out the fridge every week and any time I'd start to get into a lunch routine, the fridge cleanout wrecked progress every time and I'd be back to eating out. Eventually I started bringing canned soups to work as they don't need refrigeration. With lunch no longer being subject to the dictates of the fridge schedule, I can start prioritizing taste and enjoyment. I got oil, vinegar, hot sauce, salt and pepper grinders to add to the soups. Canned chicken adds a lot to them as well, and just enough calories so that I don't get hungry again an hour later.
I have similar routines for dinner, which allows more flexibility due to a fridge I can control and a stove and utensils and all that. It's still limited by the fact that I can't cook every single night. So I compromise, building on frozen dinners, adding onions, peppers, seasonings, butter, protein, then saving half for the next day. Make things a little better each time while staying within your routine. Eventually it's all muscle memory and your mind focuses on what's new and it doesn't feel like drudgery.
Health comes in after you've finished the heavy lifting on the first two. I started noticing little differences in how I feel after meals, and adjusting how much I eat each time. Pounds have been coming off effortlessly, but I don't feel hungry very often unless I get off my routine for whatever reason.
Your computing life can be simplified the same way. Build on a foundation, in my case Ubuntu. Years ago I maintained a set of instructions, nowadays my scripts are reliable enough to get a brand new Ubuntu system from just installed to usable in some 10 minutes. I use them more often than you'd think.
You learn deeper concepts over time. I kept everything on Dropbox until I found Spacemacs and projectile, now I'm moving it all back to git. I used to keep complicated sync scripts in .bashrc, now I manually run a sync script as a matter of routine. Workflowy is giving way to orgmode. Ruby may never be dislodged from my life, but I've been adding in Crystal for use in keyboard macros. More power is slowly earned and the number of Sorcerer's Apprentice ordeals dwindles.
This seems totally ass-backwards to me. If I followed this order, I'd almost certainly kill myself, either out of boredom from optimizing for ease of preparation or by sheer gluttony by failing to optimize for health adequately.
I optimize for health, to the extent that I can with minimal effort, then taste and enjoyment, then health again to whatever remaining possible extent, and only then ease of preparation.
Just goes to show that most advice is not one-size-fits-all I guess.
I mean, if you can force yourself to eat once a day for the rest of your life, or never eat a donut ever again, well, more power to you. I'm not that disciplined. What I can do is pay close attention to how full I feel and eat only until then, never keep going until I'm stuffed. Even then it's only for the few times a week where I'm not eating one of my portioned out routine meals.
For awhile I was getting hungry during the day outside a meal so I keep pre-portioned 100 calorie snacks, usually nuts, for 3pm. As I slowly adjust my intake downwards, my need for these is slowly going away. I think when my current stash is gone, I may not need to re-up.
Now I can't even really imagine doing it significantly differently. If I drove to work I'd bring a week's worth of lunch from home and precook it, but since I walk I don't want to carry all that.
It seems to be operating in something like 2 main phases: an initial exploratory phase in which it expands almost in every direction and then a second "optimization" (simplification) phase in which it just keeps the links between the food sources.
I think we operate in a similar way. We learn by exploring and then we optimize when "exploiting".
Everyone is different though, some like exploring more, others like optimizing more, and there's a big range in between. It also depends on the subject or activity.
I personally almost exclusively enjoy the exploration part (learning about things), and don't have much interest in the optimization part (executing repetitively the same thing for gain).
calendared, with a priority increasing as the date approaches
"done at this time", with a repeat timeframe, and again ramping priority
Set priority project / reminder, so I can get to it when all the other priorities above them are clear
I've added some extra features on top of that (a column that lets me do a one time +/- to the priority) and it just works the way I think now.
Plus Simple Notepad on my phone so i'm two clicks away from typing down anything that comes up.
* A notebook
* Some phone apps like Flow
* Bulk toothpaste
* Duplicates of utilities like USB cables
* UNIQLO t-shirts
* A Sonos speaker system
* Ubiquity networking equipment
Gosh it sure seems expensive to live a simple life.
Those are expensive? You know what kind of crap the average American (and not even the richer ones) spends on?
E.g. compared to the average "fast fashion" items, chased by many even dead-broke people (from sneakers to whatever), UNIQLO t-shirts are almost as cheap as it gets this side of buying balk from China.
As for the rest, a notebook is like $2, toothpaste you'll buy anyway and balk is cheaper, usb cables you'll buy anyway (and they'll live longer if you have duplicates for the home and office compared to carrying them every day, straining them, and losing them), and the Flow app is free.
That leaves us with a speaker (around $300 and some wifi router). This is cheaper than what many people pay for coffee over 2-3 months...
I think this is the feeling that people get when they simplify things and try to adhere to minimalism. It's easy enough to focus first on your digital life, like the author noted. Get rid of all the unnecessary things on your phone. Then perhaps move to your computer - tidy and organize all those random links and shortcuts on your desktop and organize all those digital photos.
Then of course, applying the principles to your own life in physical reality. Automating monthly payments, getting recurring shipments of things you need (I get monthly shipments of coffee, but you could probably get things like toilet paper, soaps, etc.), tidying up your house or apartment. I believe we all heard the stories about how Steve Jobs had multiples of the same shirts/pants to simplify his decision making in the morning and free his mind. Personally, I went and got 10 pairs of the same socks and did away with most of my others (socks of various sizes, colors, lengths, etc.) - now, whenever a sock loses its pair, I can simply pair it up with another sock as they are, after all, the same.
Minimalism has quite a few benefits, how you can best implement it in your own life will vary depending on your routine and lifestyle.
As David Allen (Getting Things Done) observed, we maintain a physical memory palace in these workspaces. Each item on the workspace is a todo, an unfinished object, a project in progress, or a reference thing in case we ever need it again. The link is works both ways: either brain-to-desk or desk-to-brain. You can probably remember where in the pile a document for some project is.
There is tangible stress having all that stuff in your head.
The beauty of filing things away where they go, off your desk, is that you get it out of your head, trusting the system, and the stress is relieved! It doesn't really matter what system you use as long as you trust it and it gets it out of your head and off your workspace.
I use a Chrome extension called OneTab that at the click of a button, collects your open tabs into an internal chrome extension page, from which you can reopen them if desired.
As you say, I find that this gets things "out of my head" into a system I can trust, and I can switch context more easily once I have done this.
Of course, I know there are native methods and browser extensions to mitigate the possibility of losing things, but old habits die hard.
Minimalism is good in both life and work. The best code is no code, and the next best is as little code as possible.
Like certain stuff looks simple in ie. golang, there's tons of opinionated design decision behind every nuance of the language. For some, simple would be more like Haskell, while for others bash (until they need to understand old code). Each eye of the beholder can argue either way.
So what is most simple? Compile linux kernel by hand, or automate it? Automation becomes "simpler" (more valuable) the more it is actually used.
The article talks about simplifying, though is more about discipline, something many find hard to find motivation and incentives for in this age of instant gratification!
> For some, simple would be more like Haskell, while for others bash (until they need to understand old code). Each eye of the beholder can argue either way.
Certainly simple != easy, but I think in the second part there "simple" should be replaced with "easy". Simple is objective, while easy is subjective [1]. Haskell may be easier for some as they've spent more time with it, similarly bash for others. However, their simplicity, i.e. how many concerns are intertwined, how much global context is required to reason about a program, can be more objectively analyzed.
> The article talks about simplifying, though is more about discipline, something many find hard to find motivation and incentives for in this age of instant gratification!
Indeed, it takes discipline to maintain simplicity. Simplicity is hard. Complexity is easy. "If I had more time to write, this letter would be shorter."
For instance, I'm not an audiophile, so I have no investment in audio equipment. A Sonos soundbar is, in absolute terms, an extremely complex device; you could measure all the steps to production and the complexity is pretty astounding. In some ways, a consumer product may be more complex because it'll have additional circuitry to provide the "simpler" interface.
But that's counting the wrong complexity. It's the interface that I care about, because I'm trying to minimize the number of tasks and things about the device I have to memorize. So now we're studying a different class of entities: tasks I have to both learn and perform, and some amount of information I have to organize. There's also a degree of risk, as the damned thing can break, and I can sink a tremendous amount of time on the phone trying to remedy it, or have to throw it out, which I don't like.
I've only used Ubiquiti products a bit, but they seem to have all their own special sauce. And, I'll bet the design tends to assume you recall things you did months ago or take perfect notes. So while I'd probaby go with the Ubiquiti, especially if the defaults just work, I might find it's simpler to set up a Linux box.
How? That's advertising a ton of complexity to me, the entire Unix OS. But... I don't have to learn anything new, any configuration goes into a repo, and updating can be automated.
That means the marginal complexity is still quite small. Managing complexity, like risk, cost or time, is very much an economic function.
And, of course, since there's a limit to the amount of complexity you can manage in your life, a production-possibility frontier naturally emerges from these choices. When you're overloaded, you're dropping unmanageable complexity, most likely unconciously.
For example, a paper journal or a plain text to-do list is very minimal, but I've found that having a dedicated to-do app is the best way for me to simplify my workflow.
* I can dump in new tasks with a quick keystroke as they come up and manage them later
* I can set a date for upcoming things and get automatic reminders
* I can make recurring tasks repeat automatically
* I can keep a backlog of completed tasks out of sight until I need to refer to something
Or, when my room is messy that usually means things are left out where I use them and are usually within reach. When I tidy up and put things away, I need to spend effort thinking about where something is, go get it, and put it away again when I'm done with it. Messy can be simpler than clean.
I found this kind of funny, given my experience with the Sonos at work:
* it seemingly can’t stay on the wifi
* the app crashes frequently, often mid song, leaving you with something that can’t be controlled (without the buttons) for a few minutes while the app starts back and and lazily attempts to reconnect.
* both the app and the device apparently need to do updates all the time, and it will nag you relentlessly if you don’t do the update before eventually not letting you use it at all.
* It doesn’t appear to support airplay, but sometimes iTunes and Spotify can cast to it in a rickety kind of way?
* The app UI/UX is also downright horrible.
It’s quite literally the opposite of what I’d consider simple.
I guess it's "simple" for him, but then it would means it's learned and anything can become simple considering that.
To me that sounds more like, finding what's works for him, and has nothing to do with simplifying. He seems to get to the same conclusion at the end.
I find preserving TODOs to be an important part of yearly evaluation of work. I can quickly go over my notes for a year and see all of the items that I did over the year. If I didn't have a rolling todo list, I'd have to maintain a separate list of accomplishments, which is actually the TODO list.