Paul Jacobson

Why Mark Zuckerberg wears the same t-shirt every day

I just watched Mark Zuckerberg’s response to a question about his t-shirt choice (apparently a similar grey t-shirt every day) and, as he said, it sounds silly but makes a lot of sense. At least, to me.

I’ve been thinking about all the choices I have in a different context and how having all those choices is pretty counter-productive. I have a lot of apps on my phone with several duplicates for a couple functions. For example, for social (personal) stuff I have –

  1. Facebook
  2. Path
  3. Google+

Of those three, Facebook is the only one with real traction for me, despite my preference for Path as a better app for social sharing (in theory, at least). I find myself wondering more and more why I still have Path and Google+ on my phone when I could still share meaningfully with just Facebook.

Take it a step in a different direction. I have Foursquare and Swarm to find friends and places to eat/shop/fill-up alongside Facebook which, although it doesn’t quite match Foursquare, covers quite a bit of ground. Maybe I could simplify some more and just use Facebook for location-based stuff too?

The same thing applies to productivity stuff too. Why bother with iWork when I use Google Apps far more anyway? I certainly don’t need Microsoft’s iOS app suite. On a related note, I’m not sure why I still have Simplenote or Drafts when I am pretty much an Evernote person for the most part with Byword for plain text notes (or perhaps Byword should give way to Drafts which is much more flexible anyway).

I could probably cut back on the apps on my devices by half to two thirds if I stopped thinking “I might want to use that one day” and really streamline my decisions when I just want to do something.

Do I really want to have to decide between 3 or 4 photo apps when I just want to take a photo?

I think Zuckerberg is right. It does sound silly when he explains why he wears a similar grey t-shirt every day but why waste that time and those thought cycles on deciding which t-shirt to wear when you have so much bigger and more important decisions to make?

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Comments

One response to “Why Mark Zuckerberg wears the same t-shirt every day”

  1. Nathan Jeffery avatar
    Nathan Jeffery

    I’m not running a multinational corporation yet, but I can identify with this approach.

    I have a pile of plain black t-shirts and a few pairs of identical blue denim shorts which I wear everyday. It’s my ‘uniform’. I have two pairs of Salomon shoes, one black pair and one grey pair. It definitely makes getting ready in the morning a simpler process, not to mention I never need to worry about mixing light and dark clothes when I do laundry. 😀

    On the mobile app front, I’ve dumbed things down recently by removing Path, Foursquare, Swarm and Pinterest.

    My primary social apps are Twitter and Instagram.

    Now that I’m spending less time on low engagement apps, I am really enjoying medium to long form content on Medium and Blogs.

    I’m still trying to simplify some more. Currently I have Flickr, Google+ and iCloud ‘backing up photos’. I guess I’m a little paranoid but I know at some point I’ll need to choose which app/ecosystem to stick with and then trash the others. I do like the fact that Flickr offers 1TB of storage but no proper desktop sync(on windows or linux) is a bit of a pain for me.

    On my desktop I keep things very simple. I’m a tad OCD about it. I don’t install a third party app if a built in app can do it.

    I’ve developed a lot of respect for Google Docs/Sheets but I’m not ready to fully switch yet so I’m still using iWork.

    Reply

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