Image courtesy of: unsplash

I love empty spaces. When I was in my 20s, I stayed in hostel for study for almost five years. The hostel had all the basic furnishings but had nothing beyond that.

All room’s walls were completely bare—no paintings, posters or photographs. There were no knick-knacks or any other little decorations anywhere.

Sparse as it was, I loved that hostel. In fact, I loved it more because of how empty it was.

I love empty spaces because of constantly fill them up with different things. My office is full of posters, books, music, magazines, computers and more.

We fill up our products, too. If people aren’t buying, we add a feature with the hope that will bring more customers.

On a website, if there’s space in the nav bar, we come up with a new menu item. Then when all the empty space in the menu bar is full, we add dropdown menus and nested dropdown menus. Or we invent newer approaches like the three-line “hamburger” icon and put menu options there.

We do this within our lives, too. At least I do. I have backlogs of books to read, CDs to listen to, video training courses and movies to watch, and more. And if I ever get caught up on those, I have a list in OneNote of the next books, CDs, courses, and movies to buy so I can replenish my backlog.

Now, it’s difficult to find an empty space in my life. When one project finishes, another get started, and few more in pipeline. Sometimes it feels “suffocating”.

And it’s suffocating when the products we build fill every bit of empty space. It’s not that a product must only do one thing, but a product does not need to do everything.

Donald Reinertsen has said that buyers choose between competing products on the basis of three of four key factors. Figure out what those factors are and make them great. Think about leaving out as much of the rest as possible.

So, instead of engaging in different activities, now learning to find an empty space in my life. I’ve cut back a bit on travel. I’m eliminating or delegating work that I’m not uniquely qualified to do. This will let me bring more focus to the important things in my personal and work lives.

I hope you’ll consider doing the same. If we can get more empty space in our lives, it will help us succeed with agile—and other aspects of our lives.