What else can I remove?

For the past couple of years, I’ve often asked myself this question: what else can I remove? The context of this is mostly around technology: list of apps installed on my devices, features and UI elements on this website, etc. In a very nerdy quest for eternal improvements and refinements of my use of technology — among other things — I find that asking myself this question helps me focus my efforts.

It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

For the design of this website for instance, I’ve been asking myself questions like: Which CSS line can I remove? Which line of code can I delete? What part of a website can I live without? I used to open HTML files and go line by line asking “Do I need this? What happens if I remove it?” The end result of these successive removal decisions is what you’re looking at (unless you’re reading this via an RSS reader of sorts, in that case, you should be proud of yourself).

It’s pretty much the same with the list of apps I use on my Mac, or on my phone. Which one can I replace with a native feature? Which app can be used in a new way so that I get rid of another one? The fewer apps I have to install and learn to use, the freer I feel, for some reason. Also, doing the same amount of things with a smaller number of third-party apps gives me a sense of using the apps I already have more thoroughly, which to me seems like less of a waste? The same sense of waste comes when two apps both offer a similar feature.

Right now, the third-party app situation on my personal Mac is as follows: 4 apps, 3 Safari extensions. Nothing more. Maestral for Dropbox syncing (used for Blot), MarkEdit for writing, GoodLinks for saving links, and NetNewsWire for RSS (used along with Feedbin). StopTheMadness, StopTheScript, and Wipr, are the three necessary extensions to make my web browser bearable. Despite this already minimal selection, sometimes I still look at this list and think about which one I should get rid of.

Does removing as many things as possible make my life better? Does it make my computer work better? Does it make me more productive? Probably not.

I’m sure if I had kept all these now-deleted lines of code on this blog, its general “vibe” would be the same. Keeping around apps I barely ever use but love, like Rogue Amoeba’s Piezo, would not drastically reduce my level of satisfaction either. The question “What else should I remove” is more a mindset than a tool for life improvement.

Answering the question is not always easy. At some point, removing another app, another service, and another line of CSS requires a lot of thought and a decision must be taken. What do I want? What do I need? What do I really need? And my examples revolve around the casual theme of tech, which is the easiest to navigate in that regard.

Sometimes I remove too many things, so I put them back.

Sometimes nothing can be removed at all: this is when I know that I’ve achieved a sort of internal peace. As it turns out, I’ve had the same Mac app setup for quite a while now: does it mean that my setup is now complete? The design of this website has been more or less the same for the last year or so: could this mean that its design is finished?

This question — What else should I remove? — may not work for everybody, just like minimalism or essentialism. It does feel more liberating than asking “What else can I add?” though.

Adding instead of substracting is what I tend to do when writing. If with a reduced list of apps and smaller HTML code I feel like everything becomes leaner, faster, and easier to maintain, I feel almost the opposite when writing and editing something.

I made this one longer only because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter.
— Blaise Pascal

Or maybe I’m just a lazy writer.