When simple becomes complicated (and why I spent half a day avoiding 30 seconds of work)

Last Friday, I wasted a CRAZY amount of time getting so caught up in the weeds, trying to, ironically, save time.

You see, I was just publishing my first blog post on this site. I was determined not to have any images on my blog posts, as I wanted as little friction as possible between me writing and being able to publish a post.

In an organisation I worked with previously, we had beautiful images throughout our articles/posts, and when I was posting them, I would spend far longer than I felt comfortable with, trying to find the appropriate images, and then structuring the layout of the page to best suit them. The end result were really visually appealing articles, but for what I am doing here, with simpler blog posts, I wanted to draw more on the inspiration of some business writers I follow who use very basic, text only posts, so that I could save that time.

I went so far as not even wanting to put what’s called a ‘feature image’ which flows through to the main blog page. So, I had a text on solid colour background image with the name of the blog post, as my feature image instead. That made it easier for the future, where I could just change the title. Easy! How smart of me!

Except things never work as simply as you might imagine behind websites, and the most basic things can cause dramas. In this case, it was the automatic resizing of my image, which then cut the text off.

So, together with AI, I looked at all sorts of solutions to get things to work. Then just when I thought I’d solved it, it looked completely awful on mobile. Back to the drawing board. Hours later, after trying about 50 different CSS code iterations on the back end, we were still no closer.

I had square eyes, I hadn’t gotten up in hours, and I was determined to solve it.

In the end, I thought, “Just how much time would it take me to grab a stock image for here”? Well, about 30 seconds it turns out.

Yep, I still have the debates of “is this too cheesy” and all the rest, but for picking one image for the main page and continuing with my imageless main blog page, I could have saved half a day and my sanity.

I think we do this with our health, too. We get so caught up in the weeds about how to eat or exercise or lose weight, that we completely miss the forest for the trees.

If we take a step back and ask, “How could this be easier?” and look at the most straightforward way, we might find that’s all we need.

If you want to overhaul or start something new, try the basics.

Instead of chasing the latest diet or supplement craze and going all in on whatever the “in” trend is, why don’t we look at how to make it simpler? It’s beautifully summarised in the quote from Michael Pollan, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Walking is a simple but excellent exercise.

Getting outdoors, some sunshine, and a good night’s sleep are so basic but these simple things can make a world of difference.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it, trying to get everything perfect, before you start.

The thing is, you probably already know a lot of what works. You’ve probably known for years. But instead of doing the boring, simple thing that actually works, you convince yourself there must be a better way. A more efficient way. A way that doesn’t require you to just … do the thing.

But sometimes the thing that saves you time is the thing that looks like it’ll take time. Sometimes the shortcut is the long way round.

And sometimes the answer isn’t in the weeds at all. It’s right there, 30 seconds away, waiting for you to give up on being clever and just pick the bloody stock photo.