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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the amount of mental power we need to use and waste every day in order to be able choose from a ridiculously large amount of choices we are constantly assaulted with. I revisited and re-read two great posts by Patrick Rhone (of Minimal Mac):

• Final Choices
• Sensible Defaults

In Final Choices, Patrick talks about the conscious act of buying and how good quality stuff is factored in the equation when making your final choice. He wrote:

Anywhere I can make a buying choice that I, with proper care and maintenance, will never have to make again for the rest of my life, I do. In those cases, I’m willing to pay far more for an item if I know it will last a lifetime and, even more importantly to me, I will never have to spend the mental energy making a choice again.

This describes the same feelings I have when I need to buy things I consider not to be daily / disposable things, like a good piece of luggage, a good pen, a good pair of shoes or clothing, a good knife, etc. Having a final choice will make it easier for me to chose from the large pool of choices I am confronted with, because right there on the spot, by choosing good quality stuff, at least 70% of the stuff goes away. My choices are now less.

On the other post, Sensible Defaults, he talks about the defaults one chooses to have when buying those transient, daily, disposable objects. Things that might last little but you need them anyway to do your everyday tasks, like a pencil, a block of notes, everyday socks, pajamas, etc. He wrote:

Sensible defaults can reduce friction and provide simplicity anywhere one can think to apply them. They are the bedrock of minimalist practice and a quiet mind.

Again, he hit the nail in aiding to have less choices. By having a default choice, a choice you already made once and you know it to be a good choice you are again making your having to choose from a large pool of options less of a pain, in fact by having a default your pool of choices is reduced to only one choice. Simple.

These two ideas can be applied pretty much to everything, like the software we choose for a specific task.

Sometimes something so simple as to try to buy baby teething cookies in a supermaket can be a mental storm: My choices: 18 different brands, types, flavors and makes. Do I need it to be organic? Do I need each cookie to be single wrapped? Vanilla or Cherry? Made in Vermont, Colorado, Mexico or Vietnam? Etc, etc, etc… Do you want fries with that? Decaf or regular? Skim milk, 1%, 2% or regular? Sugar or sweetener or nothing? Small, medium, large or XL? To go or to sit? 0.3, 0.5, 0.8 or 1mm in diameter? I don’t know….!

Henry Ford once said: “I’ll give you any color you want so long as it’s black.”

Less choices are better. Less choices simplify life. Take something that it is dear to me, packing light: You can choose to bring a piece of luggage or pack that has 3 compartments, 5 internal pockets, 4 external pockets, security straps, 3 different carrying options, detachable wheels, etc… Or you can choose a simple piece of gear that is big enough for the things you need for this trip, has only one big compartment for your clothing and only the necessary pockets to keep your small stuff organized in a simple and very accessible manner. I’ll go for the last one. Again, less choice. In this particular case less choice means not having to think too much about the amount of stuff to bring since the pack is small, or having to think too much about where to put each thing: in the top internal pocket? The side external pocket? What if I needed later? What if I need more? What if…

Simplicity is necessary in order to have less choices.

I tend to levitate towards simplicity, software simplicity, gear simplicity, and simplicity in general. Several years in the military taught me to trust simplicity. In battle simplicity can save your life: you don’t have the mental ability nor the time to start figuring how a certain piece of gear works, things need to remain as simple as they possible can. You have to cut choices here to the minimum number. You learn to use every feature of that simple gear and you train with it until it becomes part of you. The idea is to use that piece of gear under fire, when your mind is liquefied by either terror or the confusion of battle.

Yes, I prefer simple things. Gear, software, clothing. Then I’ll learn each and every detail and I will use them to the fullest of their capacities.

I’m trying to achieve the same with choice. Strip choice to the bare minimum: by choosing quality, simplicity of design and options I am reducing the amount of choice I have. I can then learn each detail on those items left on the pool of choices and choose wisely from them; and in doing so I am sparing the pain of having to do this again soon.

I hope you don’t mind this brain dump. It’s been on my head for several weeks already.

finermac:

Mail Tip: When using data detectors (introduced in 10.5 Leopard) to create iCal appointments from Mail messages, highlight some text first in order to have it automatically inserted as a note in your new event.

Another one of those little details I had no ideas about until now. Awesome tip.

Attention Economy | James Shelley:

If you treated your attention as a monetary value, would you be considered broke, middle class or well-invested?

This, my friends, is the question for the age in which we live.

CrashPlan – Free Backup Software, Disaster Recovery [Sponsor]:

I am very proud to welcome CrashPlan as this week’s RSS Feed sponsor. See that lovely chart right up there (Excellent work by Michael of Protocol Mac). That is my backup strategy as outlined many times before and in the latest episode of Enough. Notice what is at it’s heart? CrashPlan is what I use. It’s what my clients use. It’s what I believe in.

CrashPlan just plain works. Quietly, in the background, performing incremental and recursive backups (backs up only changes after the first full backup and does file versioning and deletion protection to boot). It compresses and encrypts your data and then backs it up, either locally to an external drive, to another computer at home, or over the Internet to another computer (Work? Friend?) or their secure cloud storage. Works great on Mac, Windows and Linux.

Oh, and it’s free. Pay only if you choose to subscribe to their storage.

Are you still reading this? What are you waiting for? What part of free backup software is keeping you from clicking that link?

Seth Eshelman from STAACH Design created the Cain chair in 2006. The chair and the Cain collection were born ultimately from the need for simple, affordable furniture, while also allowing extra features like being stackable and the ability to be upholstered.

The Cain chair is STAACH’s first piece to truly encompass every form of sustainability in manufacturing and design, from sourcing and fabrication (it’s made with extreme reduction in tool usage) to shipping methods.

This is an old favorite of mine – I love the simple, functional and straightforward lines of the design and appreciate the sustainability embodied in every aspect of it.

“Doing that annoying hard stuff is how you grow, get better, and learn what real help looks like. Even if that’s not the answer you wanted to hear. You get better by getting your ass out of your RSS reader and fucking making things until they suck less. Not by buying apps.”

- Merlin Mann, “Distraction,” Simplicity, and Running Toward Shitstorms (via dancarlberg)