Managing Complexity v. Eliminating Complexity
The other day, I saw a ridiculous Instagram advertisement for the Motion app. Its core premise was that Motion will help solve the problem of running three companies “all by yourself.”
I’m sure the app is useful, but one could also solve the problems of running three companies simultaneously by running fewer companies.
Yet the ad made me think about how often the choice to purchase services to manage complexity or eliminate the complexity arises.
Every few months, I see a request for leads on a virtual assistant. My internal question is always: OK, but how many of the tasks the assistant is doing are necessary?
There are loads of products and services we can buy to organize and store our possessions. But we tend to forget that we also have the choice to have fewer possessions. You don’t need to buy more hangers if you have fewer clothes.
Last week, my wife and I hired a crew to do the annual spring cleanup of our front garden. But, if we wanted to, we could create a desert-style front yard with almost no living vegetation so that we’d almost never need to manage it.
These manage v. eliminate choices ultimately implicate our values, and they are good prompts to consider what and why we hold fixed or mandatory positions.
For example, as a coach, I’ve seen people design elaborate self-care routines to better manage their stressful jobs without naming that by only dealing with the resulting stress, they are saying the job itself is in a “must have” category.
In the closet organization example, the choice to buy more hangers is an implicit statement that the current amount of clothes we own is considered fixed.
In the virtual assistant example, paying a virtual assistant is a statement that our lives wouldn’t be just fine if those tasks were not completed.
When faced with this choice, I personally have a strong bias toward reducing the complexity. For example, my basic cap on the number of projects I can work on at any given time is driven by whether I can remember everything I need to do without elaborate task management or scheduling intervention.
And I still do our taxes, in part, to determine whether our finances are simple enough. The moment we need to hire an accountant or any number of financial advisors is a day we are either fantastically wealthy or have grossly complicated things.
Each one of us will come up with different answers to the manage versus eliminate question based on our varied situations and preferences—there’s probably not a “right” answer. But I think the wrong answers likely derive from failing to consider our values.