John Gall buried this observation in a 1975 book most people have never heard of. The book is Systemantics. The line is this:
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a simple working system.”
It takes a moment to land. Then it starts appearing everywhere.
Every note-taking system I built that eventually collapsed was designed from scratch to handle everything at once, every category, every tag, every possible future use case, all accounted for before a single note was even written. Every system that actually held together started as something almost embarrassingly simple, and only grew once the simple version revealed a real gap.
Software works like that. Organisations do. Habits do. The projects that survive tend to be the ones that resisted full architecture on day one and started with something small enough to understand completely. The ones that do not usually begin with a diagram and too much confidence. Bad combination, that.
Gall’s Law is quietly an argument against a particular kind of ambition, the kind that confuses planning with building. It produces detailed frameworks nobody follows, productivity systems that get redesigned more often than they get used, and second kitchens nobody ever cooks in.
The useful version is boring, which is probably why it works: start with something too simple. Let it run. Add only what the working version shows you is actually missing. Repeat.
My notes system, I call it Ingrid Third, was a mess for years because I kept redesigning it before I had lived in it long enough to know what was missing. The version that works now is smaller than anything I planned. It grew into something instead of being forced into it.
Simple works. Complex is earned.