When you're limited, you're focused. When you have too many options, you get lost.

Take posting to social media platforms as an example. You’re boxed in by constraints: character limits, image sizes, and basic formatting. Because of this, you have to get straight to the point. There’s no time or space to hide behind aesthetics — it’s all about the message. This kind of constraint is liberating. It forces you to focus on what matters most: the idea.

Now think about what happens on a company website. You’ve got endless control—fonts, layouts, animations, transitions, you name it. You can push the limits and fine-tune every detail. But here’s the problem: the more time you spend perfecting the presentation, the less focus goes into the actual content. Even worse, you end up stuck in endless rounds of review, debating how things look rather than what they mean.

That’s exactly my issue with these infinite canvases and real-time collaboration tools. They promise to make teamwork smoother, but what really happens? The spotlight shifts from the idea to the formatting. You’re arranging sticky notes, tweaking arrows, messing with colors. It becomes a design challenge, not a discussion. It’s like walking into a meeting room with a whiteboard cluttered from a past conversation—confusing, overwhelming, and impossible to follow. Digital canvases are no different—tools that seem designed more for distraction than for helping ideas shine.

Legacy tools like PowerPoint aren't much better. You’ve probably spent hours tweaking slides, aligning text boxes, and selecting the perfect font, only to realize that all that time didn’t actually make your argument any clearer. It’s the same trap: you’re working hard, but it doesn’t feel like progress because it isn’t. The effort is wasted on formatting instead of making the idea stronger.

The irony is, with all these formatting tools at our disposal, we end up spending less time thinking and more time decorating. When we should be sharpening our ideas, we’re stuck making them look pretty. It’s frustrating because it feels like you’re doing important work, but at the end of the day, the substance is still weak.

That’s why constraints are actually helpful. They force you to focus on what matters: the idea itself. When you take away the endless formatting options, you put all your energy into making sure the idea is clear, compelling, and well thought out. That’s real progress.

Think about the strict formatting rules for high school essays. Double-spaced, 12-point font, one-inch margins. Why? So you’d focus on your argument, not the presentation. There’s a reason English teachers didn’t let you choose fonts or add graphics — they wanted you to spend your time crafting a solid argument, not playing with visuals.

In a professional setting, it’s no different. The more control people have over how ideas are presented, the more time they’ll spend on the presentation and the less time they’ll spend on the idea. It’s human nature. If you give someone a blank canvas, they’ll spend hours painting it instead of thinking about what the painting is supposed to mean.

That’s why I’m a big believer in standardized formats for internal communication and idea-sharing. Long-form written explanations, for example, force you to be clear. There’s no room to hide behind flashy presentations. You have to articulate the idea fully and thoughtfully, and that’s where the real work happens. When you standardize the way ideas are shared, you level the playing field, and the emphasis shifts back to the content, not the format.

The lesson is simple: don’t let formatting take over. Whether you’re working on a website, a slide deck, or a collaborative tool, resist the urge to obsess over presentation. Focus on the idea. Let the constraints guide you. The more you constrain the presentation, the clearer and more thoughtful your ideas will become.

Because at the end of the day, a great idea doesn’t need a fancy presentation to be powerful. It just needs to be clear.