This post continues from Stop adding new features to your product.
Before, we looked at how adding new features to products increases complexity, which incurs hidden costs. Conversely, we gain hidden benefits when we simplify the product, trim unneeded code and focus on essential features.
It sounds unrelated, but we can apply this mindset — reduce complexity, gain benefits — to our personal lives too. If we approached every day thinking “no code is better than no code”, we’d improve quality of life.
The hidden costs of life complexity
Let’s first define what complexity means in a personal context. Similar to businesses adding new features to products, we often add “life features”, or anything persistent that takes up time, energy or money. Examples of adding life features include:
- Buying new things: such as clothes, gadgets, accommodation.
- Pursuing self-improvement: like installing new app features, we push ourselves to master new skills and hobbies.
- Making commitments: saying ‘yes’ to too many things, overpromising.
On first glance, life features improve your life. But they add complexity, which incur hidden costs the same way bloatware clogs an app. For example:
- Adding features to your life means more stress and work. Buying a new gadget adds another point of failure without you realizing; it’s another chance for time-wasting maintenance. As the Fight Club saying goes, “the things you own end up owning you.”
- More features means more opportunity cost and less focus on important goals. James Clear’s post on Warren Buffett’s two lists illustrates this best: avoid secondary goals as they distract you from primary goals. Since your time is finite, complexity skews your life towards quantity over quality.
- Likewise, overcommitting imposes cognitive load, which means less mental resources for tasks that matter, and more stress with its associated health problems.
- False productivity — new features and complexity give an illusory sense of accomplishment, but in reality you may be nowhere closer to what’s important. As John Pavlus says, “lifehacking is so seductive because it’s simply easier than asking some bigger, harder, more important questions about where your time and attention go.”
We don’t need more
We’re often so blinded by adding new things to our lives to realize the costs. Common wisdom tells us we don’t need as much as we think. For example:
- Photographer Chase Jarvis: “the best camera is the one that you have with you”
- Photographer David duChemin: “Gear is good, vision is better”
- Srikumar Rao: “There is nothing that you have to get, do or be in order to be happy.”
- Derek Sivers: dialling back your drive to achieve results in the same output
Notice how none of the above asks us for more — these people have escaped what Mark Manson calls the Disease of More. So what can we do to prevent complexity from clogging our lives and reap hidden benefits instead? We can adapt the solutions to product complexity — such as trimming features — to a personal context. It starts from knowing the self better.
Awareness and asking better questions
Just like how cognitive biases lead to feature bloat, our mental models bias us toward adding complexity. Reducing it thus requires introspection — we need to know ourselves and needs better, and a good starting point is examining our attachments. Anthony DeMello, in his book Awareness, defined it as:
An attachment is a belief that without something you are not going to be happy.
People often confuse attachments for life goals, which results in adding life features. We strive towards the next milestone on assuming it’ll satisfy us. But as DeMello pointed out, that’s only a belief; a mental model.
If we can differentiate between attachments and life goals, we can then ask better questions of ourselves. In Rory Vaden’s talk on multiplying time, he mentions that “the first thing to do in your funnel of tasks is to ask if it should be done in the first place” — wise words for both software developers and the rest of us. Before we add a new feature in our lives, we can ask the same question — should I be doing this in the first place?
Then, follow up with Gary Keller’s “one thing” focusing question:
What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
By asking these questions, we force ourselves to pause and reflect before adding complexity to our lives. We may realize that instead of signing up for that new class, we can spend physical and mental resources on what’s important. Instead of adding life features, we can invest in time assets — anything that frees up time in the long term.
Agile in life
Agile — a well-documented software development framework — also tells us how to reduce complexity in life. Put simply, Agile emphasizes iterative development and rapid feedback.
We can iterate when experimenting with life features — try, fail, recalibrate and repeat. Instead of making large commitments and purchases, we can start with an MVP (minimum viable product), and then make incremental changes from there.
To illustrate this better, imagine that you’re considering starting a new running habit. Without the agile mindset, you might:
- Spend resources on equipping yourself: buy running gear, research on running routes, plan running schedule
- Execute the plan
However, adopting an iterative approach, you could instead:
- Reflect and ask yourself if you want to start the habit
- If you do, start running the next day at the nearest location (MVP)
- Iterate: over time, you realize that you’re only interested trail running
- Equip yourself for trail running, thus avoiding the hidden costs of buying unnecessary gear had you not adopted an agile mindset
This approach is best summarized by Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts: whether in life, career, or writing, you need a shitty first draft to get a fantastic final draft. Have the courage to abandon practices that aren’t working out.
Be “smart and lazy”
The “smart and lazy” approach applies here too. Again, 80% of our productivity/happiness comes from 20% of our life features. Therefore it’s wise to focus on the core 20% that results in greatest happiness.
We can start by considering what will improve our quality of life for the lowest cost. Tim Ferriss’s book Tribe of Mentors has a great question that asks “What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?” Read the book, answer the question and find your own $100 or less purchase.
Also, we can adopt more uncommon productivity techniques such as:
- Strategic incompetence. Exert the least effort in activities that give the least benefit. Effort should be commensurate with reward, and doing so will free up resources for high-yield, important goals.
- Deliberate procrastination: in his aforementioned TEDx talk, Rory Vaden introduces procrastination on purpose — deliberately putting off unnecessary tasks. Sometimes, problems solve themselves if you leave them alone. Pre-crastinating (ticking off tasks before the deadline) results in wasted resources and more complexity.
The overall principle is: maximum upside, minimum downside. New features in life often achieve the opposite.
Instead of adding the good, take out the bad
Previously, we read that “Good programmers write good code. Great programmers write no code. Zen programmers delete code.” In the same vein, we can approach life via negativa. Inspired by Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, The Art of Manliness argues that you improve quality of life by removing downside from your life. Taleb also says:
In life, antifragility is reached by not being a sucker….. knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition — given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.
Applying this principle, we could focus on removing annoyances in life instead of features such buying more material goods. Removing a constant thorn in your flesh makes you happier than a new phone.
Using the “one thing” principle, ask yourself today: what’s the ONE annoyance you could remove today that would improve your life?
What do I add to my life then?
All we’ve discussed above raises the question: if new features add harmful complexity, what should we add to our lives?
We shouldn’t stay stagnant and never improve — that’s equal to a product owner who doesn’t improve the product. Rather, we need to add the right features to our lives while being aware of the hidden costs that new features incur.
But what does “right” mean? The key lies in the first point we discussed: awareness and asking better questions. To know what features contribute to larger-than-life goals and self-actualization, we need introspection. Similar to how defining the right growth metrics is crucial, we need time and solitude to engage in life design — not life hacking.
It’s time for us to rebel against the tyranny of maximizing, simplify our lives and enjoy the ride. As writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery said:
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
