The case for doing fewer things

Every plan we’ve ever been handed shares one instinct: add.

Add a feature, add a channel, add a page, add a headcount, add a quarter. Addition is the default answer to nearly every business question, partly because it photographs well. A new thing can be announced. A removed thing just quietly stops causing problems, and nobody throws a launch party for that.

So consider this a closing argument for the other direction.

Roadmaps

Start with roadmaps. Sit in enough planning meetings and you notice that every feature has an advocate, but almost nothing has a prosecutor. There is no Vice President of Removing Things. Each addition is individually reasonable, which is exactly the trap: reasonable additions compound into a product nobody can find their way around, and then the roadmap grows a new item to fix the confusion the roadmap created.

The teams we’ve watched win do something that looks like negligence and is actually nerve. They build less. A feature that doesn’t exist never breaks, never confuses anyone, never needs a support article. The cheapest code to maintain is the code you talked yourself out of writing.

Founders sometimes worry that a smaller product will read as a smaller ambition. In our experience it reads as the opposite.

Focus is what ambition looks like when it grows up.

Websites

Websites work the same way, only faster. A homepage accretes like a reef. A banner for the promotion, a popup for the newsletter, a badge for the award, a chat bubble because a competitor has one. Every element earned its place in some meeting, and together they cancel each other out, because attention doesn’t scale with the number of things asking for it. A page that says one thing clearly will beat a page that says nine things at once.

Founders tell us they know this. Their homepages tell us they don’t believe it yet. Belief tends to arrive after the redesign that cuts the page in half, when nothing bad happens.

We ran this experiment on ourselves. Our site is black and white. Not as a trend, since trends are rented, but as a subtraction: color is a thousand small decisions, and removing it left the work with nowhere to hide. Everything on the page has to earn its place with shape and words alone. It’s the same discipline we’d prescribe to anyone, applied to our own storefront first.

Careers

And then careers, where the math is identical but the stakes are personal. The people we admire most didn’t get exceptional by accepting everything. They got exceptional by declining good options to protect great ones, over and over, for years. That’s harder than it sounds, because the options that dilute a career rarely look like mistakes. They look like flattery; they arrive as invitations.

A career can fill up exactly the way a homepage does: with reasonable additions, each defensible, until nobody, including its owner, can say what it’s about.

Barn owls figured this out without a strategy deck. They hunt alone, they hunt at night, and they’ve spent a few million years getting unreasonably good at one thing instead of adequate at twelve.

Subtraction is hard for one simple reason. Every cut has a defender, and every defender has a decent point. Saying no requires you to disappoint a specific person today for the sake of an abstract clarity tomorrow. Addition asks for none of that. Which is why doing fewer things isn’t a productivity tip. It’s a spine.

This is the fiftieth piece in this journal, and the last of its first season.

There’s always another topic. The editorial calendar, like every roadmap, would happily grow forever, and we’d rather stop while we still have things to say than continue past the point of having said them. Ending on time is subtraction too.

Season two will exist when it has a reason to. That’s the standard everything else here has to meet, and we don’t see why we should be exempt.

We’ll be back when we’ve got something worth the ink.

Until then, enjoy the white space. We left it there on purpose.