All of us have too much complexity in our lives: we have too many devices, our kids are going to a million places, at work we have zillions of things we’re supposed to be doing. But, is there a way to be simple?

A research on the value of simplicity found some interesting facts: They examined product development teams to see who got the most done and they found that:

• overly rule driven and complicated processes resulted in the wrong products being produced very efficiently.
• teams with no rules had a great time getting nothing done.
• finally, they found companies and teams benefited from having a few rules that would guide work but leave flexibility for innovation.

There are three steps to coming up creating a simple business process:

1. What’s the objective? what are we really trying to achieve here? Is it revenue, is it growth, is it notoriety? This is usually easy to identify.
2. What’s the bottleneck process? for example, is it the product development process? or maybe is the hiring process? This is the hardest step.
3. What are the rules? Once you identify your bottleneck process, define a few and very simple rules to deal with it and to avoit it.

For example, if I give you three rules to remember for partnerships, or three rules remember for investing or dieting, you are more likely to remember and do it, even if you’re stressed out, you’re busy, you’re got a zillion things to do, you can say, wait a minute, I’m supposed to think about hiring people and I remember these three rules, and that’s all I have to remember. This is particularly effective when you’re just stressed out with too much to do.

Summing-up: You can make faster decisions when you’re simple because you only have to think of a few factors. Simplicity is not only faster but it’s actually better than using complicated formulas and lots of data. And it’s better because people actually do it, and they will do it because it’s easy to remember and to apply.