Digits
"Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion."
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Ch. II)
I'm a fan of simple rules, but the admonishment to "simplify" isn't really so simple as it appears because it gives no criterion by which to judge how much is too much, or what should be eliminated. To solve the first problem, I have a simple rule of my own: no set that any human has to work with should extend beyond nine items, because that's the upper bound on what anyone can work with anyway. If you think you can do more at a time, you're fooling yourself; above that number any new item pushes out something else.
The set of all books in my personal library, for example, is not something I can work with. It just sits there until I take out a subset of it and place it in my "current rotation" stack. The implications of this rule for the number of tabs I should be allowed to have open at any given time are obvious, and the fact that I just discovered an add-on for Firefox that automatically enforces this -- as opposed to encouraging the self-delusion that I really can handle 30+ tabs at a time -- has made me swap back to using it as my default browser, for now at least.
Don't yet have a codified solution to the "what to eliminate" problem yet, though.
(Edit: Corrective addendum.)
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Ch. II)
I'm a fan of simple rules, but the admonishment to "simplify" isn't really so simple as it appears because it gives no criterion by which to judge how much is too much, or what should be eliminated. To solve the first problem, I have a simple rule of my own: no set that any human has to work with should extend beyond nine items, because that's the upper bound on what anyone can work with anyway. If you think you can do more at a time, you're fooling yourself; above that number any new item pushes out something else.
The set of all books in my personal library, for example, is not something I can work with. It just sits there until I take out a subset of it and place it in my "current rotation" stack. The implications of this rule for the number of tabs I should be allowed to have open at any given time are obvious, and the fact that I just discovered an add-on for Firefox that automatically enforces this -- as opposed to encouraging the self-delusion that I really can handle 30+ tabs at a time -- has made me swap back to using it as my default browser, for now at least.
Don't yet have a codified solution to the "what to eliminate" problem yet, though.
(Edit: Corrective addendum.)