Design methods are life jackets. Not straight jackets.

Structures, whether they’re processes, frameworks, or plans, are excellent tools to navigate complicated problems. They bring efficiency, reduce ambiguity, and offer defaults.

However, when dealing with fundamentally complex problems, applying structure too early can lock in outdated notions. Because structures tend to ossify. As more team members join after the structure is in place, they may not understand the underlying thinking. They start adopting processes and frameworks while being unable to answer why they exist.

Templates are ready-made blueprints. They’re convenient, no doubt. But they often end up replacing the hard work of thinking about the problem.

In the worst cases, templates are square pegs forced into round holes. And they can sometimes lead to what I like to call “performative solutions.”

You’re doing the steps because they’re there, but are they really solving for the actual job-to-be-done?

Here’s a guiding principle to help you think about processes:

Process should formalize how things already work. It should fit the problem naturally, not impose itself.

Misapplied structure can actively obscure the underlying dynamics of a problem. This hinders real understanding, as people must now overcome the inertia of the structure to discover how things truly work!

You see, people will tell you not to reinvent wheels.

I disagree.

There’s no substitute for thinking about a problem bottom-up. And if you find there’s no need to think about the problem bottom-up, you’re— either not working on the right problem, — or, underestimating the complexity of the problem.

Making something from scratch lets you see all the little details and nuances that templates might miss. And the process of figuring things out on your helps you build real courage and conviction in your solutions.

This also ties into the adverse effects of gyaan-culture.

The journey from complexity to simplicity is often a hard-fought one. Experienced practitioners arrive at simplicity after having waded through complexity. It’s only after having their hands dirty all this while that they are able to distill their wisdom into clean insight.

However, their audience misinterprets this templated simplicity as an all-encompassing prescription, leading to all sorts of trouble.

The simplicity presented is like the visible tip of an iceberg, while the underlying complexity remains hidden. This misunderstanding can and often does lead them to passively accept templates and avoid thinking independently.

So, think of any framework as a lens that guides thinking, not something that replaces it. No single lens is universally applicable, and overreliance on one will only create blindspots.

Tobias Van Schneider in his blog talks about a new way to think about building modern software—

We are so accustomed to something new and seemingly better around the corner, we don’t commit to anything anymore. Not to clothes, to music, to online tools or physical products. Companies and publishers recognize this and see a shortcut. If you don’t care about the quality, they have no reason to either.

But the blame is on us as consumers as well. We are insatiable, easily bored, easily distracted. If your app isn’t delivering new features a mile a minute, we’re out. If a new app springs up that offers the same thing in a shiny new package (and it will), we’ll abandon your app and jump to the next one.

We’ve lost our sense of pride as producers and consumers.

The heirlooms you receive from your grandparents are treasured, passed down generation to generation. A silk scarf, beautiful in its worn softness. A piece of furniture, as solid and stately as the day it was built. A physical toolbox, carefully polished and organized after decades of use. Today, we’re satisfied with the item that will arrive soonest to us from Amazon. Where has our pride and care gone?

This is what inspired our vision for mymind. Everyday we ask ourselves: How can we take the beauty and care of a physical product that lasts generations, and apply it to a digital product?

Similar to an Eames chair, designed with love, purchased after careful consideration, placed in a prominent spot in the home, passed from family member to family member. We’ve always worked in the digital world, but we seek to build digital products similar to quality physical products of past times.

Consider a leather journal. You can touch it, smell it, hold it, feel the texture. It gets worn with use and that makes it more beautiful. You can hand it down. It’s cherished by those who inherit it.

Consider your vintage Ray-Ban glasses. You don’t throw them in your bag where they’ll be scratched, or leave them lying around where they’ll easily break or be stolen. You wear them, carefully clean the lenses and put them back in their case. You might have another cheap pair of throwaway glasses you use now and then. But you’ll always have your Ray-Bans. They were designed to last, to be loved.

While it may not be as rewarding in the short-term, we want mymind to be that kind of product.

We don’t want to stress about keeping up with other tools (many of them here today, gone tomorrow) and shipping new features to satisfy “users” who demand it. We don’t want to try to meet every need and create a monster of a product, dinging bells and tooting whistles until we spontaneously combust. We want to achieve the purest form of our tool and let it continue to be that. We want to be here 10 years from now. We want to create, if possible, the digital equivalent to the iconic chair, sunglasses or notebook. Something you proudly care for, polish, return to, count on year after year. Something you own for a long, long time.

The desperation for newness is a sickness of technology.

It’s a disease perpetuated by algorithms, desire for immediate satisfaction and the craving of dopamine unfulfilled by unhealthy lifestyles.

Refusing to succumb to that illness requires saying no. As creators and business owners, it requires forgoing the temporary rush of users riding one tool to the next. It requires coming back to our original mission, over and over again, every time we make a decision about our tool.

And we hope it leads to something meaningful. A tool built to last.