This thought experiment is changing everything for me

I’ll be completely honest with you.

This brand Reality Designers that I’ve been building has taken a lot out of me in order to complete. In fact, I would say that it hasn’t actually reached any form of completion. And in my opinion, I don’t think that is even the point.

You see just like our lives, our life is a continuous stream of ongoing events that keep happening. You can’t shut your life off.

You can close your eyes and pretend that the outer world does not exist while you travel internal dimensions, and that’s fine. But often times you won’t actually bring out too much of what’s inside of yourself out into the world if you’re at all like me who tends to overthink every detail.

So when we’re speaking about this project. I recently came to a very profound realization that I need to make the creation of my content as frictionless and as easy to commit to as possible.

I’ve spent the last few months developing a headless content architecture for this website so that it can display content from an external database. Meaning, I can edit review and publish content from my phone, iPad, or computer, anytime I want, without the restrictions of many web building platforms. This all got me thinking..to test an experiment.

A phone is one of those devices that we commonly use every single day. In fact, personally, I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have my phone for even a week. Our lives are maintained and built directly from the devices we frequently use every single day.

My iPad is that perfect middle ground between being just a bigger and better phone, but it also has its limitations in what I’m able to do because it’s not quite a computer.

You can’t really code or run advanced 3D software modeling programs from an iPad among the other things I typically would use my computer for.

And that’s why I chose my iPad for this experiment. Because when I’m on my computer, I can get lost deep in development and future thinking and designing or creating things that may not ever see the light of day.

I don’t even want to think about how much content I have actually created that never got posted because it didn’t inherently fit within a design system or whatever else.

So, currently I’m writing this all out on my iPad, and in 10 minutes this article will be published. I can begin to benefit from all the previous work I did to build this all out.

Because of all that I’ve done to make it as easy as possible, which, by the way, the many countless hours to build a system for - I’m now able to whip out my phone or iPad and post directly on here, from anywhere instantaneously.

I’ve built a system for designing my own digital world and will continue to improve every area.

We often take for granted the tools that we have accessible to us. I also think that we don’t spend enough time thinking about the tools that we really need which may often require us to build them ourselves.

Because I have made posting to this platform as easy as possible that I can and have designed it from the ground up - I know more than anyone about what is happening behind the scenes, what it needs, and where it can improve, far beyond a traditional platform.

When I’ve limited myself to being able to post content only from my iPad, it has given me the perfect set of limitations to make me have to think harder about what creating actually is and how to do it better and develop systems so that my actions can be replicated.

All of this might seem trivial, and perhaps you’ve heard about similar things before, but to me, it has been changing everything. Simply put, I have been gathering a tremendous amount of insight to the pain points that were invisible to me when creating for this project, which ultimately led me to figuring out how I could patch those fixes and make things easier.

You’d be surprised what attempting to make things easier for yourself does to your creativity. Now it’s all I think about.

How can I build systems to better help me do things in a more organized way?

How can I create templates for how to think in directions that allow my mind to see the larger and smaller picture at the same time?

How can I automate tasks and make things easier for me to do more, with less effort?

This is why I love working from my iPad. It is that perfect ground between a high-powered device while remaining limited to not having a keyboard to do more advanced things which I frequently get lost doing because I just love to learn.

As a developer and a designer, my mind loves complexity. My mind loves to create very complex networks of interlinked things that all work together in some magical way.

But, when it comes to this brand and everything we’re doing here, it has to be different. There are many realizations that have come from limiting the digital real estate that I can use to maintain my brand.

There is an invisible magic to the now, and is one of the most important pieces that myself and many other creators overlook as having significance and importance.

My take away is this: If you’re building a brand or whatever you’re doing online, it is perfectly fine to add a lot of complexity into what you’re doing now, and to do more work than necessary in the initial stages of setting it up.

But, at some point, you’re gonna wanna look at the entirety of what you’re doing, and what outcome is actually being produced from every individual action you’re taking, and to check whether or not those specific actions are contributing the value you think it is.

And once you have identified which actions are the best to take, try to find continuous ways to automate at least small sections of that task, reducing the amount of work and effort, it takes to do the thing itself so that you can get as close as possible to the inspiration that occurred in the moment of when you first wanted to take action.

What I’ve noticed is that they are so many of these and areas within the creation of content that you can often get lost in the specific details of how to publish or post the thing, by the time that you run through all the steps, it’s already lost its meaning - simply due to the amount of work you had to do to bring the thing into existence.

As a creator, you have to avoid that. That’s the only way you’re gonna stay in this for the long-term. Prioritize making it easy, and if it’s not right now, spend a lot of hard-working hours to make it easier for yourself in the future.