Are You Adding Unnecessary Complexity to Your Life?

Photo by Vitaly Gariev

There’s something I find myself saying all the time in coaching sessions, so I might as well say it here too:

Only add complexity where it’s necessary.

We have a tendency to want to organize, to add, to move around.

But that tends to be “make-work”. 

It doesn’t often move things forward.

And, you can get stuck so easily, when you’re trying to create the perfect taxonomy.

My goal is to limit overhead; I want to do the thing, whatever the thing is, with the least effort possible.

Let me give you a few examples, from real life coaching sessions, about how and why we should avoid complexity unless it’s absolutely necessary:

• “Organizing before”

Often the act of organizing can prevent us from doing the thing that we need to do, that would make things better.

Several years ago, I was coaching a client and he was telling me about how he had been procrastinating on giving his wife his computer because there were a bunch of photos on it, and he needed to organize the photos before he could relinquish the laptop. 

(As the person in my own relationship who is almost always the recipient of the hand-me-down tech, I felt this deeply.)

And I asked a simple question:

Why do you need to organize the photos before you can give her the laptop? 

And he said:

“You know, I don’t know.”

Here’s the thing: 

He was making it more complex than it needed to be. 

In the end, he put all the photos in a file, uploaded them to the cloud, and maybe he organized them or maybe he didn’t.

But it was no longer the barrier to his wife getting the laptop.

• Tasks

Building out an effective, low maintenance task system is something I help all my clients with.

And, for most of my clients, the impulse to build out a complex folder structure is STRONG.

But I caution against this. 

Instead, I suggest we start with only 2 categories: work and home.

If we find that we need more complexity, we can always add it later. 

But because we prioritize based on date/time, it’s often not necessary to use a complex folder structure. 

And, in fact, using a complex folder structure often makes it HARDER to use the task system.

Counterintuitive, but true.

• Filing

We often approach filing systems with a top down approach. 

We create the perfect taxonomy, replete with subfolders, and sub-sub-folders.

But then, you go to file something, and it doesn’t fit into your very neat, pre-determined categories.

What if, instead, you created the folders as you needed them?

Wouldn’t that be simpler?

Wouldn’t you end up with fewer empty folders?

Wouldn’t it be faster to find what you’re looking for?

So, the next time your impulse is to organize, to put things in categories, to move things around, I want you to ask yourself if doing so will actually help you get things done, or if it’s just a way to feel like you’re being “productive”.