If you’ve read my blog before, you may have noticed a past article I published about how I’ve been reworking my online presence with minimalism in mind. So far, that effort has been paying off well! And I’m glad to share some lessons I’m learning along the way.
When it comes to minimalism, it’s easy to take the wrong approach and believe that means putting in low effort or thinking small in scale, but neither of those could be further from the truth. Minimalism isn’t about reducing the quality of the efforts you put into your work – it’s about maximizing the impact those efforts have in bite-sized pieces.
Lately, I’ve been playing around more with releasing content publicly that I promote very little (or not at all) through my main “brand”. This has allowed me to experiment with some unique, small ideas, and the results have been eye-opening for me.
Rather than trying to create massive projects with a huge scope, I can spend more time on smaller projects that serve very, very specific purposes. Being able to step away and see a small project that is high quality and impactful on the target audience is incredibly powerful (and good for my mental health, too)!
Massive, ambitious projects can be fun, but after several weeks or months of working on them they can very quickly become too daunting to complete. Almost every project I work on blossoms to a larger size by the end, no matter what it starts off looking like, so if it starts large you can imagine what it might look like by the end.
Over the last few months I’ve felt refreshed and less weighed down by my projects because of the changes I’ve made to my online presence. Gone are the themed and detailed graphics and feature-filled website, removed are the live stream overlays and alerts, and decimated are the plans for a Minecraft server with hyped-up unique gameplay mechanics that are custom built.
My hobbies have become something I am in control of, not something that has become a chore I don’t want to touch.
I’m very much enjoying starting AND FINISHING smaller-in-scope projects with very niche focuses and goals. My KPI tracking is more narrow and ignores the excess. What this means is that even though a project is small and “minimal”, it is far easier to explain, promote, and for people to understand.
I’m not yet ready to share all of the small projects I’ve worked on and dropped around the net under pseudonyms, but for now it’s nice to see the experiments working. Expect to see more of these hyper-focused projects landing over in the The Café Discord Server (linked in the menu) and my YouTube channels.
Remember: Just because something is small in scope doesn’t mean that it’s small in scale. Scalability is how we measure the bredth of reach and sustainability of the impact over a long period of time. High quality effort put into small projects and strategized around a very specific target focus can actually be quite scalable, and I’m very much looking forward to exploring this concept more.
As Strunk & White would say, “Omit needless words.” Well, let’s take that one step further and go with, “Omit needless features.” Anything that doesn’t impact the focused goal needs cut. No exceptions.
Do you have something you can cut down in size to get better control of and launch instead of procrastinating on?