Delete things

Just because I advocate for neatness doesn't mean I think you should keep everything forever.

I'm just reconfiguring my mailing list and came across this screen in the excellent (and FOSS) Listmonk mailing list software.

A screenshot of Listmonk's 'templates'. It's a web console thing. There are 5 templates and I don't know what 4 of them are.

These are the templates that you use when you send an outbound email. I tinkered with this back in July and I know that I always want to use one of these templates.

Hmm. But which one was it?

Less choice is less friction

It's a common theme around here: less choice is to be embraced. Design fewer areas and categories, not more.

Is this the first time I've mentioned Barry Schwartz' Paradox of Choice?! It can't be but it seems so. That link was the TED talk; it's also a book and is worth a read.

This isn't quite the paradox of choice, but the idea is the same: why have all of these choices? Are they good? Helpful? No! In this case they're just confusing. I don't remember which one I want. They slow me down.

I think we keep things around just in case. What if I wanted to use one of these templates later? Is there some setting in there that I couldn't recreate? Something I might look at and learn from?

Eh, there might be. But probably not. Life would be better ā€“ a tiny bit, but surely ā€“ if I deleted the four templates I didn't use. So I just did.