My friend Cindy Cotte Griffiths wrote a piece as the year began that holds an excellent lesson. She tells a story of a project her young son was working on. Instead of trying to add a whole bunch of elements, he wanted to see how few elements it would take te get his task done.

He was disappointed that he couldn’t get it done with just one piece, he needed at least two. Here’s how Cindy tells it:

“Recently my son told me “You can’t do it with one.” I was remembering a visit to the American History Museum more than six months earlier. He was talking about his attempt to attach magnetic objects on a ramp in order to direct a ball into a hole in the hands-on science exhibit.

I was delighted he remembered because at the time I stood there marveling at his minimalist approach.

For over an hour, every other kid immediately proceeded to add as many gadgets as possible to the ramp. More and more and more, without even checking if their system worked.

When my son walked up, he was the only one to remove all the pieces and try with one. Only one. No matter what he did, it didn’t work so he tried two.”

What a great thing to remember.

I am in the midst of developing an agenda for a meeting, and I know that my own advice to myself is usually just to keep agendas as short as possible. But, when you’ve got a whole day to fill, you get worried, and you start to add in this and that until your agenda looks good on paper. You want others to know you put effort into it, so you add more.

It’s a discipline to keep to about one subject for every 90 minutes. But I am going to do it.

I’ll see if I can use the bare minimum, starting with just one thing, and build from there only if necessary.