Ryan's Rules #57: Do not dismiss simplicity.
In one of my previous jobs I had a team member who was meticulous. Think “a fully colour coded planner for the day before most people got into the office” and you’re on the right track. At one point, just so I could compare, I gave them and one of their teammates an even number of simple tasks each. By the time my meticulous associate finished building the really very important spreadsheet to track progress, the other had three tasks already crossed off the scrap of paper they had written them down on.
Neither of them were lazy. All of the tasks got done before their deadline and the results were up to scratch. Both were sharp (I don't suffer fools on my team) but I did note two very different relationships with complexity, and this gave one of my team a significant headstart. Six months later they were doing a different job while beautifully color-coded spreadsheets were still the order of the day for the other.
We've all been there in some form. You're facing a problem, and instinct tells you the solution needs to match the magnitude of the problem. Big challenge, big system. Important goal, elaborate plan. We look for the best framework, find an app or service that will help us, write up a business justification, trial three different suppliers and drop a chunk of change on a multi-year contract. Then we move on to drafting multi-step processes to account for it all. The complexity is a clear sign of seriousness. Except it rarely is. Usually all of this effort is because we don’t want to get on with the work.
Simplicity Has a Bad Reputation
When something looks simple we equate it with easy. "Simple" is a synonym for "basic" or "unsophisticated." It’s not going to win any prizes. Complexity means intelligence, right? Let’s leave simplicity for the thickos. A 40-tab strategy document and a polished executive summary feel better than a single clear problem statement. Even when that statement is the thing people remember. The one they will act on.
Staying honest, let’s admit that most of the time the elaborate system isn't rigor. It's plain old avoidance. All the effort we pour into frameworks and processes is often just a way of postponing the actual work.
Simplicity is not the absence of thought. It is the result of it. You can make something complicated without any effort; it just requires adding things. Think about your colleague who insists on bringing ideas to a committee. Building a project charter. Adding in irrelevant processes because it looks impressive. Maybe I didn’t describe your colleague there, maybe I just described you. Making something simple requires a deeper understanding of the problem at hand. You need to know it well enough to know which bits you can remove. The design world has a phrase for this. It was borrowed from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away.
Complexity doesn’t just mean more hoops to jump through at the beginning though, there’s a hidden cost that waits until later to sneak up on you: maintenance. A complicated system goes beyond just hard to build. It rewards your blood, sweat and tears by being hard to sustain too. It’ll break more easily, be more confusing when the next person attempts to use it, and it will drain your energy every single time you have to improve it, modify it or sort it out.
Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast
There's a phrase that originated in military circles that captures this idea perfectly: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Almost a contradiction in terms. How can slow ever be fast?
Things become clearer once you've watched someone rush. Rushing introduces errors, and they require correction, often taking more time to correct than doing it right in the first place. Put another way, more haste equals less speed. I am a firm believer that “move fast and break things” has an awful lot to answer for in this regard. Speed achieved through haste is a short-term gain that almost always creates long-term pain.
Being deliberate, in control, doing only the simple things necessary to get the job done, that's the slow part. When the slow part is smooth it means fewer errors and less rework, which is exactly what lets you move fast.
Imagine a seasoned operator shooting at targets versus the nervous novice fumbling at every step. The simple deliberate habits, repeated consistently, lead to flawless execution. A complicated and chaotic habit, abandoned after eight days because it required too much upkeep, doesn’t go anywhere near the bullseye. Simplicity, therefore, is the thing that lets you move without friction.
Where This Shows Up in Daily Life
In personal productivity, a single prioritized list will beat a project management suite you don’t know how to use. You put one task in front of the other instead of trying to figure out how in the hell to create a dependent task in MS Project.
In business strategy, a short and sharp tagline ("we help X customers do Y better") beats a mission statement with four embedded clauses.
In product design, the feature that just makes sense beats the one that requires a tutorial or training session.
The pattern is there because the underlying mechanisms are all the same. Complexity throws up blockers. Simplicity just lets you plug away and finish once you continue to show up.
Deliberately Choose Simple
Ok, so earlier I gave off about people introducing frameworks where they were not needed. But what do you do when you don’t know how to simplify? Simplicity isn't a default state you fall into; in a world full of tools, templates, and "best practices," it's a discipline you have to actively choose. So ironically, here's a little framework to help with that. Trust me, it’s simple to follow.
Strip it back. Ask what this thing is actually supposed to do. Remove anything that is nice-to-have and doesn’t achieve what it is supposed to. No extras! Aim for the core function only.
Test with the tired version of yourself. Will this still work on a low-energy Tuesday, not just on the motivated Monday when you designed it? Simple systems survive bad days. Complicated ones don't.
Let repetition prove the need for more. When the simple version has been tested and has been found lacking, only then add something. And only add one thing at a time!
Finally, protect the smoothness, that’s where the fast comes from. If things are not going fast enough, ask yourself whether the process is smooth. Where are the friction points? Where is the thing not sturdy enough, not easy enough or is inconsistent. Inherent smoothness of a design is what produces and maintains real speed over time.
Simple Is Not Easy
Expect this to be difficult. Tiring. Almost worth giving up on and building a gantt chart that can go to a weekly advisory board for approval. You need to be prepared for the hard truth that simplicity will require more skill and patience than complexity does. A chef can hide mediocrity behind ten ingredients and three sauces. A simple dish, four ingredients and a pan sauce, will expose weakness immediately. A simple explanation requires you to actually understand the subject at hand. The complicated approach gets by on jargon. It papers over the gaps in your own knowledge for longer than anyone will admit.
So the instinct to add complexity isn't usually a sign of rigor. Sometimes it’s a sign you haven't fully figured it out yet. Resist the urge to hide behind complexity.
Simple Will Ask More Of You
Simple is solid, not because it asks less of you, but because it asks you to give more: clarity, restraint, and the discipline to keep removing what doesn't serve the core need. Take slow is smooth and smooth is fast, not as a clever paradox or line from an F1 movie but as a description of how friction actually works. Every needless layer you build into a system, a habit, or a plan is friction you'll pay for later.
The next time you're tempted to make something more sophisticated to prove you're taking it seriously, pause. Ask whether you're adding value or something else.
What's one place in your life right now where a simpler approach might actually outperform the complicated one you've been building? I'd like to hear it in the comments.