Keeping things simple may sound easy at first. But in actual fact, simplicity is one of the toughest things to achieve and maintain! Many things in our lives will complicate over time naturally. It is how we handle these changes and tweak around to ensure we maintain simple things. But in short “Simplicity is not as simple as it is”!
Simplicity is one of sought after principles at work.
Simplicity actually means a lot at work. Being simple and straight to the point, you can help your company to save millions of dollars and investing too much time working on complex issues. Why simple things are more valuable than complex things? Because simple things are easy to understand, not understanding yourself, but anyone else! Customers don’t have to spend hours trying to figure out what you are trying to say, and your team mates can easily support your project or take over work from you without any loss of knowledge or information. Bosses are happy and very clear of your projects and achievements. Isn’t that great? It is so much better than creating an extremely powerful but complex system that you are proud of but no one else know how to use it!
Here are some ways to add simplicity in your work:
- Work with an end in your mind. It is very similar to creating vision and goals. If you are clear of how your product or presentation slides look like at the end, you will know how to achieve that. “Reverse engineer” your way back to the basics. This way will help you to be focus on your end-state and not stray away from your focus, ending up creating complex solutions that can be solved easily.
- Eliminate redundancy. Redundancy is one of the main contributors to complexity. Set yourselves various checkpoints, where you actually stop working and review what you have done. Eliminate any redundancy if necessary. Sometimes we tend to add a lot details, just to make it clear but at many times things can be intuitive enough to be understood without further details.
- Think and work in the shoes of your audience. Another important principle of simplicity. It means easy to use, easy to understand. Always ask yourself why are you including these details? Does it help my audience to understand? Do they need to know before they can make any decision or take action? The best way is to get someone to read through your documents or use your product and give you feedback on it. Knowing what they want, you will be able to eliminate a lot of the complexity from your work.
- Let others do the “dirty work”. At many times, things cannot be that simple. It simply just cannot be eliminated and yet everything look too complex. A great way to deal with that is to redirect or delegate something to solve the complexity, so your audience or customers don’t have to deal with the complexity that will put them away. Automate things that can be automated through simple excel formulas, instead of having the customers to put in a formula and values, why not create something really simple that they have just to fill in the necessary values and let the program do the dirty work? Simplicity in this case is enhancing user experience which is one of the most important aspect in product design or process design.
Over time, you can expect to lose simplicity. It is a natural process where things complicate when they age. New things pop up and taken care of, quick fix or enhancements needed etc. So constantly review and decide if a “simplification” is needed. I bet if you can make it a point to make things simple, others will be impressed by your work! Many others tend to just to get things done and move on, but being able to spend a little bit more thought and work, you make a quantum difference that distinguishes yourself from the rest.
Here are some great resources that worth investing your time in:
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