Simplicity

You’re drowning in complexity. Your calendar’s rammed, your inbox is a disaster, you’re juggling seventeen different priorities, and somewhere beneath all this chaos, there’s a version of you that used to have time to think. That person’s gone now, buried under layers of unnecessary complication.

Here’s the truth. Most of what’s overwhelming you doesn’t need to be there. You’re carrying dead weight. You’re solving problems that don’t exist. You’re busy being busy, mistaking activity for productivity, and it’s costing you.

Simplicity isn’t about doing less and achieving less. It’s about doing less and achieving more. It’s about cutting through the noise, identifying what actually matters, and ruthlessly eliminating everything else. And you desperately need to learn how to do this, because your current approach is unsustainable.

The Barrenness of a Busy Life

Let me describe someone I see constantly in my practice — a composite of several people I’ve seen with this pattern. They’re exhausted. Not physically tired, though they’re that too, but mentally depleted. They can’t focus. They can’t remember things. They feel overwhelmed by the simplest decisions. They’ve got nothing left.

When we talk through their day, it becomes clear what’s happening. They’re spending their time on everyone else’s priorities. Answering emails that don’t matter. Attending meetings that achieve nothing. Ticking boxes on bureaucratic forms that serve no real purpose. They’re slaves to a complicated life where every moment is claimed by someone or something else.

There’s an old line that captures this well: beware the barrenness of a busy life. Constant activity doesn’t equal meaningful existence. You can fill every minute of your day and still accomplish nothing of value. Worse, all that busyness prevents you from seeing what’s actually important.

Your health suffers when you live like this. Your stress levels are chronically elevated. Your sleep quality deteriorates. You develop physical symptoms — tension headaches, digestive problems, muscle pain — because your body’s trying to tell you what your mind refuses to acknowledge. This is not sustainable (Cohen, Janicki-Deverts, & Miller, 2007).

Bringing simplicity back into your life isn’t some luxury for people who’ve got their life sorted. It’s a necessity for survival. Reducing complexity reduces your cognitive load, which reduces stress, which improves your health and general well-being.

And here’s the bonus. Simplicity gives you those rare moments of clarity where you can actually think properly, where you can see the path forward instead of just staggering from one crisis to the next.

Life Is Simple, You’re Making It Complicated

There’s a saying, often credited to Confucius, though it doesn’t appear to trace back to him in anything he actually wrote: “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”

Think about that for a moment. Most of your complications are self-imposed. You’ve said yes to things you should’ve declined. You’ve taken on responsibilities that aren’t yours. You’ve created systems and processes that are more complex than necessary. You’ve added layers of stuff between you and what you’re actually trying to achieve.

Doing Less, Getting More Done

Here’s the principle. Simplicity means doing less yet getting more done. This sounds paradoxical, but it’s not. The key is that you’re reducing the unnecessary and unessential, which creates space for the work that actually matters.

Pareto’s principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes (Koch, 1998). Applied to your work, this means about 80% of your results come from 20% of your activities. The result is obvious: 80% of what you’re doing contributes only 20% of the value.

I’d take this further. True simplicity isn’t about finding the productive 20% and doing more of that. It’s about identifying the one thing, the single most important activity at any given moment, and doing that. Just that. Right now.

Every day, there’s one task that, if completed, will make a real difference. One decision that matters more than all the others. One conversation that needs to happen. If you can identify that thing and actually do it, you’ve had a productive day. Everything else is secondary.

This is hard because it requires saying no to almost everything. It means disappointing people who want your time. It means leaving things undone that someone thinks are important. It means accepting that you cannot do everything, so you’d better do the right thing.

But when you actually implement this, when you ruthlessly prioritise that one essential thing each day, your productivity doesn’t just improve incrementally. It transforms completely.

Occam’s Razor

William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century friar, gave us a powerful tool for cutting through complexity. Occam’s Razor states that when you’re choosing between competing explanations, you should prefer the simplest one with the fewest moving parts. It’s worth knowing that this precise phrasing doesn’t actually appear anywhere in Ockham’s own writing — it was attached to his name centuries later (Thorburn, 1918). The principle holds regardless of who said it first, and it applies to virtually everything you do.

When you’re solving a problem, try the simple solution first. Don’t build an elaborate system when a straightforward approach will work. Don’t create a complex explanation when a simple one suffices. The simpler solution is easier to implement, easier to understand, easier to fix when it breaks, and more likely to be correct.

Einstein supposedly said, and yes, it might be apocryphal, that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” That’s the balance you’re aiming for. Not simplistic, which is an oversimplification that loses essential elements. Simple: elegant efficiency that keeps everything necessary and nothing more.

I think of a client of mine who was restructuring his agency around this time. Occam’s Razor guided every decision he made. Did they need three project management systems? No, one would work fine. Did every decision need his approval? No, his team was competent. Did clients need weekly reports? Some did, most didn’t.

Each layer of complexity he stripped away made the operation more effective, not less. Simpler systems are more robust. They’re easier to maintain. They break less often. When they do break, they’re easier to fix.

The Lost Art of Simplicity

Somewhere in adulthood, most people lose their simplicity. They accumulate possessions, commitments, responsibilities, and complications. They can’t remember when their life last felt manageable. They’ve lost sight of how to restore simplicity, and they’ve lost their way in the process.

It’s far too easy to become lost in chaos. Modern life actively conspires against simplicity. Mobile phones mean you’re always accessible. Working from home means you’re never off duty. Email and social media create constant interruptions. Bureaucracy generates endless paperwork. Before you know it, your daily path through life is an uphill battle against unneeded complexity.

Charles Warner wrote, “Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough” (Warner, 1904). Most of us are carrying steamer trunks when a backpack would suffice.

When you feel stuck in the mud, when clutter and complexity are getting in your way, when stress levels are rising, and your mind is filled with noise, that’s when you need simplicity most urgently. That’s when you need to stop, look at what you’re carrying, and dump everything that isn’t essential.

Lao Tzu named three treasures at the heart of Taoism: compassion, frugality, and humility (Lao Tzu, trans. 1995). For thousands of years, wise people have recognised that simplicity isn’t a limitation. It’s liberation.

The Modern Complication

Technology was supposed to simplify our lives. It’s done the opposite. You’ve got apps for everything, notifications constantly pinging, messages arriving through seventeen different channels, and somehow you’re busier than ever.

The middle layer of bureaucracy has expanded exponentially. Forms to fill, boxes to tick, compliance requirements to meet. Most of it serves no real purpose except justifying someone else’s job. But you can’t ignore it because there are consequences for non-compliance, so you’re stuck dedicating time and energy to meaningless administrative tasks.

You’re mentally exhausted and fatigued because you’re spending your days ticking other people’s boxes. You’re checking off items on lists that don’t advance your goals, fulfil your values, or improve your life. You’re working hard to satisfy external requirements whilst your own priorities languish.

This creates a particular kind of despair. It’s not the exhaustion of hard work towards meaningful goals. It’s the fatigue of wasted effort, of energy expended on things that don’t matter. It’s soul-destroying in a way that actual challenges never are.

The Path Back

Simplicity lets you focus on what’s really necessary. It’s the only way to declutter, to let the clutter you’re carrying fall away. But getting there requires active choice.

You need to audit your life regularly. List everything you’re committed to. Then ask, honestly, “If this disappeared tomorrow, would I miss it? Does this serve my goals and values, or am I doing it out of obligation, habit, or fear?”

Be ruthless. Most of what you’re doing doesn’t need to be done by you, or possibly doesn’t need to be done at all. Every commitment you eliminate creates space. Every process you simplify creates capacity. Every layer of complexity you strip away makes everything else easier.

Have moments in your day, even brief ones, where you lose the complexity of the world around you. A few seconds of pure, effortless being. This isn’t meditation instruction or mindfulness practice. It’s just stopping. Breathing. Experiencing life without the constant mental chatter about what you should be doing.

Concentrate only on what’s important. Focus on that one thing that really needs doing right now. Let everything else fade into the background where it belongs.

The Transformation

When you genuinely embrace simplicity, your life transforms. Not in some mystical, intangible way. In practical, measurable ways.

You have more time. You accomplish more with less effort. You make better decisions because you’re not overwhelmed. You sleep better. Your stress levels drop. Your relationships improve because you’re actually present instead of constantly distracted.

You stop feeling like life happens to you and start feeling like you’re actively living. You regain agency. You remember what it’s like to have mental space to think rather than just react.

This isn’t easy. Simplicity requires saying no constantly. It means disappointing people. It means going against cultural norms that equate busyness with importance. It means accepting that some things won’t get done, some opportunities will be missed, and some people will be frustrated with you.

But the alternative — continuing to drown in complexity, spending your life serving other people’s priorities whilst your own life passes you by — that’s not acceptable either.

Choose simplicity. Not because it’s fashionable or because some ancient philosopher recommended it, but because you literally cannot continue functioning effectively under your current load.

Strip away what’s unnecessary. Focus on what matters. Let everything else go.

Your life depends on it.

Simplifying your thinking only works if your mind is clear enough to think well in the first place. When you are carrying too much in your head, nothing gets the attention it deserves. The next article is about how to offload that mental weight so you can actually focus.

Further reading

1. Cohen, S., Janicki-Deverts, D., & Miller, G. E. (2007). Psychological stress and disease. Journal of the American Medical Association, 298(14), 1685–1687.
2. Koch, R. (1998). The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
3. Lao Tzu (Trans. 1995). Tao Te Ching (S. Mitchell, Trans.). Harper Perennial.
4. Thorburn, W. M. (1918). The myth of Occam’s razor. Mind, 27(107), 345–353.
5. Warner, C. D. (1904). Backlog Studies. Houghton Mifflin Company.