Creating simplicity is more challenging than creating complexity. The discipline of removal and refinement takes more time than addition.

tl;dr. Elegant minimalism takes time to distill. Your work is not finished when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more that can be removed.

Question: how many words should a post like this contain?

Answer: the fewest possible to elegantly present its ideas.

Richard Feynman is famous for taking the time to reply to the many letters he received from both the public and his peers. He started one such reply with the apology “if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”.

And that’s the reason there is so much shitty complexity in your life — elegant minimalism takes time to distill.

I regularly work with young creatives — mostly coders, designers, and copywriters. The most common mistake I see them make is a focus on what else to add to their work output. I regularly remind them that their work is not finished when there’s nothing more to add, it is finished when there’s nothing more that can be removed.

Another regular for me is the software company whose product is still mostly the original prototype. To increase scalability they need to idiot-proof* it, which requires a focus on simplification, a process that frustrates stakeholders by requiring a level of effort that can exceed the original build (just another reason that the initial build cost of your software will only account for 20% of its lifetime cost).

When it comes to writing, I’m a fan of Google’s style guide for Material Design, especially its side by side do and don’t comparisons.

Google’s style guide for Material Design

As for my own writing, it takes real effort to curb my grandiloquence. These posts start as a bulleted list outline, then a Shitty First Draft, and then I spend at least twice as long editing them down to their essence. Admittedly I’m making a better job of that here than in my other posts.

Brevity is an art.

It takes time, but it’s worth it.

*I hate the term ‘idiot-proofing’, but reader testing this article showed it was understood by more people than alternatives. My issue is that it promotes a mentality where a company thinks of at least some of their customers as idiots. A more accurate term would be ‘edge-case-handling’ — more about that in a future post.