Why simplicity is your secret weapon in a distracted world
Here's a sobering stat: the average time a person focuses on one thing has dropped from 2½ minutes to 47 seconds over the past two decades. These are your users, your team, and yes, probably you too.
We're all swimming in an ocean of notifications, choices, and shiny objects competing for our increasingly scattered minds. And as AI makes it easier to create more content, more features, and more complexity, the noise only gets louder.
This isn't just a problem for end users scrolling through their phones. It hits everyone behind products too. Developers, designers, business users, content creators, and marketers all face the same attention crunch. When everyone's mental bandwidth is stretched thin, simplicity becomes less of a nice-to-have and more of a survival strategy.
The art of taking things away
Do you remember playing Jenga? The goal is not to add more blocks. It is to see how much you can remove while keeping the tower standing. Building simple products works the same way.
To avoid pulling the wrong blocks, everyone needs to agree on what keeps the tower standing. Maybe that's the core user problem you're solving, or the one thing that makes your product different from everything else out there.
The question is less about "What else can we add?" but "How much can we subtract while keeping the core message clear?" This takes a special kind of courage. You have to kill your darlings, set your ego aside, and get closer to what users actually need versus what you think they want.
This mindset applies everywhere. In design, it means choosing clean over visual sugar. In copy, it means cutting that clever phrase that doesn't serve the user. In code, it means resisting the urge to over-engineer solutions. Every discipline has its own way of overcomplicating things, and catching yourself before you do it becomes a skill.
The magic happens when you use constraints as a creative catalyst. Instead of seeing limitations as roadblocks, treat them as guardrails that force you toward better solutions. When you can only use three colors, one font, or five features, you naturally focus on what matters most.
Quality ingredients make simple stand out
The Chez Panisse in Berkeley pioneered the farm-to-table movement, building the entire restaurant philosophy around exceptional local, seasonal ingredients prepared simply to let their natural flavors shine. Their cooking style emphasizes techniques that enhance rather than mask the ingredients' inherent qualities. They famously would rather serve a perfect peach than an elaborate dessert.
The same principle applies to digital products. Instead of elaborate feature sets, focus on perfecting the core elements that matter most to users.
The internet is getting flooded with low-quality AI creations that all looks and sounds the same. In this environment, quality sticks out like a handwritten note in a pile of spam emails. You still need high-quality pieces in the places that matter. Maybe it's a custom typeface that carries your brand identity, that extra attention to detail in the overall execution or copy where every sentence is carefully crafted and focused on your differentiation.
Consistency becomes your superpower. When your design language and messaging stay aligned across every touchpoint, users don't have to work to understand you.
Why is it so hard?
If simplicity is so obviously valuable, why doesn't everyone do it? Because organizations are complicated, and complicated organizations naturally create complicated products.
The biggest culprit is the vision of feature parity. The belief that you need everything your competitor has, plus one more thing. This thinking comes from not really understanding what users need. It's easier to copy features than to do the hard work of research, testing, and tough prioritization calls.
There's organizational resistance to dropping anything. Every feature has an internal champion, every page has someone who fought for it. Saying no requires creating buy-in, for example through a compelling product vision.
On the bright side, AI when carefully implemented becomes an opportunity for simplicity. Smart automation can hide complexity by making decisions for users, e.g. during onboarding. Instead of presenting 99 options, AI can ask a few questions and configure everything behind the scenes.