Any-benefit and simplicity
Most complication arrives one sensible decision at a time. Naming the habit is the first step to keeping things simple.
There’s a habit Cal Newport names in Deep Work that I’ve seen everywhere since. He calls it the any-benefit mindset: you adopt a tool, a feature or a service if you can think of any way it might help, without ever weighing that benefit against what it costs. Newport was writing about social media and the people who do thinking for a living. I think the habit has crept into everyday business too.
It always looks sensible. The plugin that adds one more report. The integration that might save a step. The upgrade to the plan with the features you’d probably use one day. Each decision passes the test on its own, because “might help” is a very low bar. Sometimes someone is overselling. More often it’s honest people being thorough. Either way the result is the same: more functionality than you need, more complication, more maintenance and, importantly, more cost. Not only in money. In attention, in things that can break, and in the time it takes to explain the whole arrangement to anyone new, including yourself in six months.
The alternative Newport offers is the craftsman’s: take on a tool only when its benefits clearly outweigh its costs for the things that really matter to you. That’s a harder question, and a better one, because it makes you say what matters first.
In practice I ask three things before adding anything:
- What does this cost to keep, not just to buy?
- What’s the simplest thing that would do the job?
- If we took it away in a year, would anyone notice?
Simplicity isn’t the absence of features. It’s the presence of only the ones that earn their place. Fewer moving parts means fewer surprises, and a system you can still understand when something needs attention. That’s worth more than any single benefit.