Every Friday morning at 8am we had an ongoing project implementation call with a client in Germany. It was an extended trial of our SaaS offering but we were on the path to conversion into production use. Each week, small niggles would be raised. We’d commit to them in our roadmap or else fix them or show the client how to resolve the problem on the call. Things were going great. This was one of a number of concurrent clients who actively trialling the product. We had a lot of early traction. The purpose built solution was very different to what everyone else was selling and was built with feedback from expert users. We had a spreadsheet built with every competitor in the space. "I think we're actually ahead," I said, scrolling through it. We were untouchable. That is, until the Friday morning when the client project manager joined the Zoom meeting alone and with a smile said “It’s not you, it’s us.”

They weren’t the only prospect that we lost out to either. Eight months later, two of our "behind" competitors were eating our market share like it was their breakfast. Their tech wasn’t better. In fact, it was a rehash of what had already been on the market for years at that point. Their sales guys weren’t secretly more advanced. When we said yes and meant it, they said yes but it was really a maybe. We had become complacent. We'd stopped updating the spreadsheet as soon as it told us what we wanted to hear.

This is the trap that "always overestimate your competition" is built to catch.

The Comfort Problem

Build It Into Your Operating Strategy

It’s Not Really About Your Competition At All

Don't Let the Spreadsheet Lie to You

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.

You cannot expect what you don't inspect. This is a quote often attributed to W. Edwards Deming, known as the father of the quality movement and lean manufacturing. Over the years I’ve often taken principles I’ve learned from working and applied them to my personal life. Like attempting to always arrive with common sense. Because not many people do. And then applying that common sense vigorously to the situation. Sometimes this still has to be at the conscious level because a problem is difficult to figure out, other times I would like to think that I just automatically apply these things. Deming is often quoted too as saying that you can’t inspect quality into things. I really like that because in my experience, that’s the very thing that a lot of auditors do and it’s also why people tend to dread audits. If you are looking to solve a problem or fix something, however, taking a closer look and considering it may just be exactly what you need.

The Closer You Look, the More There Is to Fix

This is not one of those posts where I wax lyrical about a small business who finally figured out why people were abandoning their carts. They caught an error that had been happening silently blah blah blah. Let’s not. Let’s go a bit simpler. I’ll tell you about a problem that I haven’t solved yet, even though I know the solution to it. A problem that I have consciously decided not to do anything about. Because when you see too much detail it can become overwhelming and a problem can suddenly become impossible looking. The mole hill becomes a mountain.

My car always looks dirty. Sure, there’s road grime that builds up. Brake dust coats the wheels. The rain dumps fine sand particles from the Sahara onto it from time to time. When I was a young man, I would watch my Dad get a bucket of water, a household sponge and some washing up liquid and wash his car. Three terrible ideas mixed into one. A single bucket means you’re “washing” with dirty water after a while, a household sponge is too coarse, and washing up liquid can damage paint. When I first started driving, I did the same. I quickly learned that is a great way to introduce swirls into the paintwork and ultimately damage your car over time. The alternative? Go full on detailer, foam cannon contactless washes, polish applications, spend more time on making a car look good for a couple of hours than you would tackling bigger problems in your life.

Surface Detail Lies to Us

Once You Start Looking, You Will See It Everywhere.

How To Look Closer Without Burning Out

The Piece You May Be Missing

Fast Is Built on Detail

On the Tuesday-est Tuesday of the year, you find yourself staring at your to-do list in frustration. Not sure what to work on next. Tired. Desperate for a break. You finally have to admit defeat. Defeated by a piece of paper, or a text file, or an app or whatever, you slump back in your chair staring a thousand yards past the prioritized items. Some of which have sat on the list as high priority for a couple of weeks in a row.

I’ve been there. So have you probably. Maybe you just took a break to scroll and escape your version of the undying to-do list and found this page.

When this happened to me the first time, I did something almost embarrassing to admit. I completed the task "reply to client email," crossed it off the list and called it a day. That evening, for the first time in weeks, I didn't feel guilty about not getting enough done. I had done something. Just one thing. And it turned out that was enough.

To-do lists are a double-edged sword. Keeping track of priorities, crossing off or deleting what's done, that's the easy part. Before I went digital, I crossed them off on the page itself. Whatever wasn’t done at the end of the day got rewritten on a fresh page the following day. New items were added below. When unrelated thoughts would surface mid-task, I'd jot them down and get back to work. Broken things, missing pieces, whatever I needed but couldn't get right away, all of it went on the list too. 

The to-do list became useful for knowing what to work on next. Useful for prioritising what I needed to get done. Really useful for helping me forget intrusive tasks and keep concentration but ultimately the to-do list always replenished itself. There was always more to do. As a colleague of mine used to say “Shane. Work is not a rabbit, it will not run away.”

Sometimes all you need is one win a day.

One Win Can Be Enough

This Is Far From An Original Thought

How To Do It

It’s Not About The Dopamine!

Take It One Tuesday At A Time

 Short and sweet: must happen will always beat should happen. 

Have you ever sat back and watched a friend talk about doing something for an extended period of time? Like launching their own studio for three straight years? Every conversation circled back to it: the market research they'd done, the logo concepts they loved, the spreadsheet of potential clients. Then one day the talk stopped. It wasn’t because they gave up. Turns out they were too busy running a studio. Sometimes talk is just that, idle chit chat, gossip, hot air, words that ultimately amount to nothing. But under the right circumstances, that idea suddenly actually needs to happen. A fun to think of “should,” becomes a mission, a must. Your friend stopped hoping and started treating it like it had to.

Most people live in "should." Should happen, it’d be nice, some day maybe. Hoping it happens isn’t manifestation and very few people ever flip that switch to something imperative. Making a thought into something that became critical to their being.

When something merely should happen, it competes for your attention along with everything else that should also happen: the gym, your hobbies, your inbox, the relationship you keep meaning to invest in. Should items get mentally filed away. It’s like that CV they’re keeping on file for future reference. The things that get done are the ones that shout loudest, are most urgent or most of the time just what are easy. Short term wins accumulate over whatever matters most long-term.

"Must," on the other hand, does not negotiate. When you genuinely believe something must happen, it stops being an option, much less an option among many. Must tasks function like a constraint you need to resolve. You don't sit there asking yourself "do I have time for this." You figure out "how do I make time for this." This unconsciously changes what you notice, who you talk to, and what you're willing to sacrifice to make it happen.

Most ambitious goals die on the drawing board, out of public view. Nobody announces they're giving up on the book they’ve always wanted to write or their funky business idea. They just let it slide. You may still dream of it from time to time but the idea is dead and you may as well bury it properly and move on.

Originality Is Overrated

Turning "Should" Into "Must"

1. Make the cost of inaction concrete

Confidence Doesn’t Enter The Equation

Where This Leaves You

Why You Stall (It's Not Laziness)