Dumb Doesn't Break

A few years ago, I installed a wifi-based smart lock on my front door. It could unlock from my phone, hand out codes to guests, and log every entry. It was the future…

It was also unreliable and pissed me off.

Sometimes it just wouldn’t respond. Sometimes the app needed an update before it would connect. Sometimes it would say the door was in the opposite position. Every single one of those hiccups happened on the one device standing between a burglar and my most prized possession (my dog). I never fully trusted it, and if you can’t trust a lock, is it even a lock at all?!

You know what has never failed me once? The deadbolt I replaced with it. No hardware, no software, no slowly increasing subscription pricing model. It does one thing, and it does that thing every single time.

This realization taught me a mantra I try my best to apply to everything I can in my life: dumb doesn’t break.

Every feature is a future problem

Here’s the mental shift that changed things for me. When I look at a product now, I don’t see a list of features. I see a list of things that can fail on me.

A “smart” washer with a touch screen isn’t just a washing machine. It’s a washing machine, a computer, software, a screen, a wifi chip, etc. Each one of those is another thing that can ruin a weekend on a whim.

By comparison, my parents’ old top loader has no software in sight. Despite that “shortcoming”, it has been chugging along for YEARS.

Did I want to love my smart home gadgets? Absolutely. I’m a developer for Christ’s sake. Unfortunately, most of them followed the same story arc. Exciting for the first week month, flaky after a month, and finally unplugged forever. The light switch on my office wall has never had downtime or got DDOS’ed by a hacking group.

The $5 board that beat every app

For years, my instinct for every new problem in life was to find the perfect app for it. Todo lists, grocery lists, habits, budgeting. Hell, I even made my own app (which I still love, by the way).

I bounced between these apps, each one promising to be the last one I’d ever need. Each one had its own account credentials, its own pricing model, etc. I wasn’t aware at the time, but I was spendnig more time organizing my tasks than actually freaking doing them.

On a whim after watching a minimalism YouTube video, I stuck a $5 magnetic dry erase board on the fridge.

That’s it. That’s the system. Need to pick up sticks in the backyard? Write “sticks” on the board. It has no login, no offline sync capabilities, no nothing. Yet, against all the odds, everyone in the house can see it, use it, and understand it in under a second. You’ll never guess what happens next. I picked up the sticks.

For the things that do belong on my phone, things that need to leave the house with me, I just make the best of the free Apple apps that came with it.

My wife and I use a shared Reminders list called “Groceries” to quickly add items we need to a simple todo list we can parse while we’re walking down the grocery store aisles. We have our own individual iCloud Calendars for personal events and a singular “Shared” calendar for events we both attend.

Are these tools and systems the most powerful ones? Absolutely not, not even close. But they’re already there, they sync without issue, and Apple isn’t going to delete them on a whim.

Simple is a feature

If you’ve read my post on simplicity in agency development, you know I already preach this at work. Every abstraction you add to a codebase is a debt your future self or your teammate has to pay for. Turns out, the same rule applies to your front door and your laundry room.

The marketing world (again, my fault, sorry) will keep telling you that smarter is better, and that every dumb object in your life is a problem waiting to be solved. But these objects were never problems. My deadbolt wasn’t a problem. My grocery list wasn’t a problem. The “solutions” I adopted ended up becoming bigger problems than they ever were.

So before you upgrade something that already works, ask yourself: “What am I actually getting, and what can now break that couldn’t break before?”

If the second list is longer than the first, keep the dumb thing. Dumb doesn’t break. And a life full of things that don’t break is the smartest life you can live.