What proportion of time do you spend adding vs. removing?
Adding feels good. It feels productive. It feels like forward progress.
Yet adding also leads to clutter, a loss of clarity, and increased complexity.
Few object to adding. Many seem allergic to removing.
Our work, personal projects, homes, calendars, and many other things improve when we assess and adjust our add / remove ratio.
One is easy to keep alive. The other has a reputation for being difficult.
The work we’re signing up to is decided at the point of purchase.
The same thing occurs with the projects and goals we take on in our personal and professional lives.
Before we roll up our sleeves and open the bag of potting soil, it’s important to think about, and pick, the right plant.
After more than 10 years with iPhones and iOS, I recently switched to a Google Pixel and am giving the Android operating system a go for the first time.
I’m enjoying it so far, but for an unexpected reason. Android is known for allowing significant customisation compared to iOS, especially at the operating system level (e.g., the Home screen). In exploring customisation options I came across an app called ‘Minimalist Phone’ that transforms the Home screen into a simple, elegant user interface.
Instead of seeing a wall of colourful tiles and being lured into browsing a host of different apps, the Minimalist Phone uses a combination of monochrome colours, shortcuts, and search functionality to help you get to apps only when you need them.
I’ve been using Minimalist for almost a week now and don’t see myself going back. If you’ve got an Android phone and try it out, let me know what you think!
Here’s what my Home screen looks like now.
Quite a few of you will, no doubt, have heard about ChatGPT by now. It’s been making waves across the tech scene, and for good reason.
ChatGPT is a prototype artificial intelligence chatbot built by OpenAI. From a simple prompt, it’s able generate shockingly detailed and specific answers.
Some are dubbing it the ‘Google Killer’ because when asked a question, instead of returning millions of websites via a results page (requiring the user to do the work!), ChatGPT summarises the best answers on the internet into a short and pithy response.
Some say it’ll kill homework for good. It can literally write a unique high school or university essay within 10 seconds on almost any subject under the sun.
It can also give you answers “in the style of” something else. Which is where I’ve picked my example for today. I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post in the style of dancullum.com on keeping things simple. This is what it came up with.
I’m impressed! The simple words, short sentences, and tight paragraphs are very much reflective of how I like to write.
But I assure you that even on my most tired of days I won’t resort to using ChatGPT for a post!
It does give me a lot of food for thought though about the AI advances that we’re going to see over the coming years. Whole jobs, industries, and markets will change. This is barely the beginning.
A house is far easier to keep tidy when at the end of every day we take 5-10 minutes to put everything back in its place.
Leave things out and about for a few days, though, and the mess adds up quickly. The accumulated mess can often take a few hours to unpick.
Tiny actions, every day, help to keep our houses, calendars, minds, projects, and goals clear of the clutter.
Everything from a luggage tag, to a Swiss Army knife, to insurance, is there just in case something doesn’t go to plan.
We prepare so the problem doesn’t hit as hard.
Or as Benjamin Franklin put it: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I seldom hear regrets when someone anticipates and prepares for the ‘just in case’ scenario.
The writer throws the ball.
The reader still needs to catch the writer’s idea.
Reading requires work, effort, coordination, and practise.
This simple idea is taken from Mortimer J. Adler’s excellent text ‘How to read a book’. The key idea of the book is a reader must be active.
Passive reading, and an expectation that the writer does all the work, is not how we learn and grow.
Time since the US Declaration of Independence was signed: 246 years.
Time for Pluto to orbit the sun: 248 years.
I’m marvelling at Pluto and perspective.
“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.“—Jacob Bronowski
It’s not just staying curious that’s important, but also the way in which we turn up with that curiosity.
A ‘ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence’ implies a willingness to wrestle in the mud, to embrace the mess, and lean into the the struggle.
There’ll always been a chance to synthesise, simplify, and polish later.
I recently wrote about some of Nokia’s poor design choices in the mid-2000s. Given this backdrop, I feel compelled to write about Samsung’s latest phone, for which it’s pumping millions of dollars into marketing around the world.
The Samsung Z Flip4 is a continuation of its flip-phone line, and feels mostly like a nostalgia play. I see minimal functional benefit, except that the phone itself acts as its own stand to take selfies—which is barely a benefit worth mentioning.
Apparently, Samsung has 65% of the flip phone market, but the entire flip phone market was only estimated at 9 million units in 2021. Compare that to the 240 million iPhones sold in 2021 to get a sense of how small the flip phone market is.
Even if Samsung knock it out of the park with the Flip4, they’re playing in the small leagues.
I don’t see this phone’s sales performance matching the marketing spend placed behind it.
I’ve set a reminder in my calendar to check in 6-9 months once sales figures have been released to see if I’m right or wrong.
We should take the first step when we’re almost ready.
When we have sufficient knowledge to move, but not too much that it stifles us.
When we have the courage to try, but not so much that we’re arrogant.
When our naivety enables us to look at problems in new ways, but not so much that we get fooled by the tricksters.
By taking the first step when we’re almost ready, we leave some space for magic to happen.
“All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.”—Goethe
The pressure is off.
We don’t need to invent anything new.
Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
Only the good stuff.
All the time.
I’m enjoying following this year’s Football World Cup.
In particular, seeing the likes of Japan topple Germany and watching their fans go crazy, that’s sport summed up in a moment.
It got me thinking about how every World Cup delivers surprise results. There is always an underdog who defeats a team much further up the FIFA rankings.
This idea extends out beyond football though. It feels like every news cycle or financial market update delivers some “unprecedented” finding.
Perhaps a better approach is to expect a surprise result. Might we be caught off guard less frequently? Could it make us more resilient in the face of adversity? Would we then welcome the normal result rather than take it for granted?
“In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”—Bertrand Russell
I love how Russell uses “to hang a question mark” as though it’s a casual thing to challenge our most dearly held beliefs.
And maybe this unpretentious approach is what’s needed. Perhaps it improves our odds of coming away with a new, better, and more nuanced perspective.
Why is it that the cabins in planes seem to either be viciously cold or blisteringly hot? There is rarely a middle ground.
If anyone knows, let me know as I’m currently boiling inside a plane at Heathrow, but it’s freezing outside on the tarmac.
On the other hand, it’s a reminder to be prepared, especially when we already know what may be thrown at us.