Emerging simplicity

Over the last year I’ve noticed an emerging pattern in process and - more generally - life: the growing need of simplicity.

I mean simple software application to deal with, simple tools, simplified UI (Apple make a fortune on that, and with good reason). Now I’ve stumbled on this excerpt from PragPub (issue #27) by Jeff Langr and Tim Ottinger:

Our recommendation: Any tool you use for collaboration should eliminate any potential distractions to focus. Perhaps the best software tool is an empty text or spreadsheet document, each providing a blank slate and a way to quickly move around, change, or highlight pieces of information.

They got to the point: eliminate any distraction. I can’t agree more with that… in every context we operate we should eliminate any waste, any distraction (= attention waste), we should resolve problems and not dealing with tools supposed to helps us to resolve those problems (and sometimes add other problems to the load). The interesting part is: time is a very scarce resource, but attention (aka focus) is even more scarce.