There’s a huge misconception about minimalism, and it’s in regards of graphical minimalism and workflow minimalism. Whether you’re on a PC or a Mac, one of the most popular trends of the ’00s has been that of adopting a minimal and simple approach to computing. As the trend went by and people even wrote books and essays about it, the original purpose of the whole concept slowly faded away, leaving place to users who only care about making their computers minimal and simple to their eyes. Yet the original purpose is still there, and I want to focus on that.
Minimalism as a computing way of working is nothing more than this: doing more with less. Being productive and efficient with a very few tools, yet maintaining a high profile when it comes to count the results of your work. From the Mac side of things, doing more with less means doing a lot of things with not so many applications on your computer. And while I believe that this way of thinking the Mac experience is surely noteworthy and interesting, on the other hand I’m firmly convinced that people who claim this is the right way of working are saying complete bullshits.
Quoting myself, “there’s no right or perfect application, there’s no best when it comes to user’s experience”. Indeed, everyone of us has his own methods and tricks, makes his own usual mistakes and, at the end of the day, is happy with the things he’s done in his very own way. For this reason, and for the sake of this post, I’d like to talk about my own way of working with Mac OS X, which I can describe as “maximalist”.
Maximalism is a very debated and “complicated” term.
“Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces. In music, minimalism is characterized by repetition and a steady pulse; in painting, by only a few colors and basic geometric shapes; and in literature, by economy with words.
The term “maximalist” can also refer to anything which is excessive, overtly complex and ‘showy’, or providing redundant overkill in features and attachments, grossness in quantity and quality and “maximalism” the tendency to add and accumulate to excess.”
Art, politics and semiotic aside, I’d like to think of maximalism as “doing less with more”. Sounds foolish (I mean, why would anybody even want to do “less”?) but delving deeper into what I think it is, it makes sense. Assuming that:
- Doing More with Less = a lot of things with a few apps;
- Doing Less with More= a few things, but with many distinct apps;
then I definitely have a maximalist workflow. I do a few things inside a lot of applications. It’s not that I’m not productive: I just managed to break down my workflow into many single parts, using an application for each part. So, I do less with more. But you if you sum up parts of the “less”, they’re equal to those of minimalism’s “more”, they’re just presented in different layout.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not about clutter. Clutter kills productivity and any kind of mental order. Having a maximalist workflow doesn’t mean being a user that clutters his computer with tons of crap. Let’s talk about the menubar for example. The menubar in Mac OS X serves as a quick way to have menus, info and applications just a click away from the window you’re focusing on. Well, turns out many people sent me emails complaining about the “too many icons” I have in the menubar, because they “clutter Mac OS X”. Seriously people, you don’t get the point. I actually use all of those icons, being them small utilities that are so greatly integrated into my workflow I couldn’t work without them anymore. Still, wrong minimalism has taken over the minds of these guys, leading them to think that too much stuff on screen= bad, bad, bad. They seem to confuse clutter with “populated order”, which is ridiculous. Having a lot of empty space on your Mac doesn’t mean you’re doing it right, just like having a lot of whitespace on a website doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a great designer. You can follow the trend, make it yours because you like it, but don’t ever stand against other people’s tastes, because that’s wrong.
De gustibus non est disputandum. Sadly, that’s what many people have been doing so far.
That was just an example but all in all, it’s not that I have something against a minimalism approach to computing. I’m here to make a public apology of the opposite approach instead, also known as maximalism from now on. You’re not cool because you use Taskpaper, and your friend’s not a nerd because he likes Omnifocus. Wait, you find wallpapers on SimpleDesktops? You’re not cool either, and please don’t say that a minimalistic wallpaper helps in working.
Doing “less with more” and “more with less” are the same exact thing, in two different contexts. There’s no better one, but computing relativism is somehow exciting after all.
