Ross Fenning's Digital Garden

Less is more

Recently, I was prompted by an entry in my Daily Stoic Journal to consider "What would less look like?".

The consideration for the day was around the benefits and virtues of being brief and concise with words, but perhaps also with other things in life.

This rung particularly true with me as I have made a greater effort to write more often, which I found came naturally when I decided it better to practice writing something daily rather than wait until I have enough free time to write full articles.

In fact, as I have trained myself to write less if I am low on time, I have paradoxically found myself writing more words in total this year than in all the years I have been telling myself I should blog more.

I have also found better success recently with communicating ideas and teaching new things to people by only talking about small parts of the idea or field at a time. There's likely a reason why university lectures are better kept to an hour at a time rather than trying to spend a whole day talking about one topic.

I am sure there are many more areas to apply the "less is more" principle and we can be more effective at something by doing less of it. In the spirit of the principle, I won't explore them all today, but I would be really interested to hear other examples in comments or on Facebook/Twitter.

Where have you done less of something and then got more effective at it? Does anyone else have experiences to share?