A little simplicity goes a long way

Sometimes making a task just a little simpler can make a huge difference. Making something 5% easier might make you 20% more productive. Or 100% more productive.

To see how valuable a little simplification can be, turn it around and think about making things more complicated. A small increase in complexity might go unnoticed. But as complexity increases, your subjective perception of complexity increases even more. As you start to become stressed out, small increases in objective complexity produce big increases in perceived complexity. Eventually any further increase in complexity is fatal to creativity because it pushes you over your complexity limit.

Going back to simplification, a small decrease in complexity can be a big relief if you’re stressed out. Maybe that small simplification can pull you out of F-state back to C-state. If you’re up against your maximum complexity, a small simplification could make the difference between a problem being solvable rather than unsolvable.

Small simplifications are often dismissed as unimportant when they’re evaluated in the small. Maybe a new term makes it possible to refer to an idea in three syllables rather than six. No big deal if it’s a term you don’t use much. But if it’s a term you use all the time, it makes a difference. That’s why every group has its own jargon.

Suppose one programming language takes five lines of code to do what another language can do in four lines. So what? How long does it take to type one line of code? But multiply that by 10. Maybe you see 40 lines of code on your laptop at once but you can’t see 50. Or multiply by 10 again. Maybe you can hold 400 lines of code in your head but you can’t hold 500. Language features dismissed as “syntactic sugar” can make a real difference.