Not the silence of a quiet room — the silence of a calendar that's suddenly, completely empty. No meetings. No escalations. No one asking you to fix something by end of day. Just you, your coffee, and the slow realization that a chapter you didn't choose to end has ended anyway.
That was me, March 2026. After more than a decade managing IT operations at the enterprise level — service desks, AI chatbots, knowledge systems, teams of people I genuinely cared about — I was let go. No drama, no scandal. Just the kind of corporate restructuring that happens when companies decide to move in a different direction. I've seen it happen to others. Then it happened to me.
What surprised me wasn't the anger. It was how quickly the clarity arrived.
Eleven years is a long time
I started in IT the way most people do — on the phones, solving problems one ticket at a time. I was good at it. I moved up. Eventually I was running workforce planning for 80+ technicians, governing million-dollar vendor contracts, and directing the strategy for an AI-powered service desk supporting 30,000 users.
By most measures, it was a successful career. And it was. I'm proud of the work.
But enterprise IT is also, by nature, an exercise in managed complexity. You spend enormous amounts of energy maintaining systems, navigating bureaucracy, and keeping things from breaking — often at the expense of asking whether the system should exist at all. You get good at operating within constraints. You stop questioning the constraints.
I had been doing that for eleven years.
The thing is, I've been a minimalist for a decade
Here's what people find surprising: the layoff didn't introduce me to minimalism. I've been living this way for roughly ten years. Somewhere along the way I started questioning the defaults. Why do I own this? Do I actually use it? What would happen if I just… didn't have it? The answers, consistently, were liberating. Less stuff meant less maintenance, less mental overhead, more room for the things that actually mattered.
I applied it to physical possessions first. Then to my digital life — apps, subscriptions, notifications. Then to commitments, obligations, the invisible weight of things I'd agreed to without really deciding.
What I couldn't fully apply it to was work. Corporate environments are not minimalist by nature. They accumulate process, tools, meetings, and complexity the way a house accumulates furniture — gradually, then all at once, until you can't remember what the floor looks like.
The layoff removed that constraint overnight.
What I'm doing now
I'm building something smaller, and deliberately so.
Effortlesstech is my IT consulting practice — serving homes and small businesses in Montreal, Quebec directly. No enterprise overhead, no ticket queue. Just practical technology help from someone with 25 years of experience, working directly with you.
UnclutteredTech — what you're reading right now — is the other side of that. The place where I write about technology that earns its place in your life. Honest reviews. Practical guides. No fluff, no hype, no sponsored content.
In between, I'm shooting landscape photography across Quebec, arguing about hockey, and eating my way through Montreal one neighbourhood at a time. The simple life doesn't have to be a boring one.
Why this blog, why now
I've spent my career helping people cut through technical complexity. I know how to diagnose what's actually broken, strip out what's unnecessary, and build something that works quietly in the background without demanding constant attention.
I want to apply that same thinking here — to the way we live with technology, the way we consume, the way we set up our homes and our digital lives. Not with judgment, and not with the kind of performative minimalism that trades one set of expensive things for another set of expensive-but-beige things.
Just practical, honest thinking from someone who's been living this way for a decade and spent a career untangling complexity for a living. If that sounds like your kind of reading, I'd love to have you along.
If you're curious about the tech side of how I've built all this, start with My Minimalist Homelab.