A friend shared the following article on Lifehacker about Otixo, a "Convenient File Manager for Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, and All Your Other Cloud Services," and it made me realize something.

https://lifehacker.com/5905784/otixo-is-a-convenient-file-manager-for-dropbox-google-drive-skydrive-and-all-your-other-cloud-services

It seems most products/services these days, and the accompanying articles describing them, follow a similar model:

"Create something that doesn't exist to solve some problem, or make some task easier."

In this specific case, they figured if a person has >1 cloud storage, managing them separately is hard so it'd make sense to create a unified interface that allows you to do that. And that's great!

However, I've found that recently (only within the last year or two, I think some time after I got my iPhone) I've started to look for another way to solve problems: by simplifying. I figure out what's essential to me, and try to throw everything else out.

So if I need to have cloud storage, there are 2 paths:

• Get Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, etc.
• Then get Otixo to help manage/unify them and make your life easier

or

• Choose the best single service, use only it

The advantage of path 1 is you get more space, but it involves more things. However, if u can get by with path 2, it involves less things, which I appreciate (more so than having that extra space, cuz right now 24 GB of free Dropbox is way beyond what I need).

My point is this: it seems my line of thinking (simplifying) is rather under-represented in terms of human efforts. How many people are working on products/services/writing articles about how to simplify, throw things out? Seems like very few.

If you want to improve your life and solve problems by simplifying, you gotta do it on your own. If you wanna solve problems by adding things, just go to lifehacker.com and such.