Less is more

While discussing with a colleague the length of a document, he came up with a quote by Blaise Pascal that made me reflect:

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

The value of writing concisely is that our cognitive constraints become an advantage: not only one is able to elaborate more easily on the whole reasoning, but, at parity of words read, one can extrapolate much more information (I tested this empirically, try it yourself).

At work, I’m often surprised by how busy my colleagues are, as if all their time available in life is saturated. Still, when something unexpected happens, they can somehow fit that in. Hence, they were not really saturated, or better, they just got rid of the irrelevant things. Quoting Parkinson’s law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

The reality is that you can spend years refining whatever task, from a presentation at elementary school to building a great business project. The key is to decide when to put the word “done” on it. Plus, imperfectly done is better than perfectly unrealized.

By nature, events tend to grow, as with meetings and organizations. It takes more work to refuse than to accept. Entropy naturally increases; it takes effort to decrease it.

The other factor in play in this epidemic of busyness is to spend time doing or improving things that are not essential to the final goal one is aiming for. Generalizing what Elon Musk said for engineers:

One of the biggest traps […] is optimizing something that shouldn't exist.

A quote from the mother of Queen Elisabeth II in the show The Crown summarizes well what could be a criterion when deciding to say something or not, and it can be broadly used also for decisions regarding choosing which activities to undertake:

- Does it need to be said/done?

- Does it need to be said/done by me?

- Does it need to be said/done now?

In short, less is more.