SHOT
Set bold objectives for the new year and focus on what you want to accomplish.
CHASER
It’s the classic New Year’s advice: Aim high! Get started! You got this! 💪🚀
What’s missing from this advice? Nobody talks about what you should stop doing.
Goals don’t exist in a vacuum. For every bold new initiative you add, something must give—an outdated process, a redundant task, or even just time spent on low-value work. Growth isn’t just about adding; it’s also about subtracting.
INSIGHT
Stopping isn’t easy. It forces trade-offs, tough conversations, and a reckoning with legacy systems.
In software development, there’s a term for what happens when programmers layer in new functionality without addressing old code: cruft. It’s the technical debt that builds up over time, making systems harder to scale or maintain. Businesses accumulate operational cruft in the same way—layers of processes, tools, and habits that no longer serve their purpose.
Why don’t people address cruft? Because stopping isn’t just about flipping a switch—it means digging into how things are done and why. It requires understanding the connections and dependencies that have built up over time. The risk isn’t just that stopping something feels uncomfortable—it’s that stopping the wrong thing could disrupt a downstream process, break something critical, or upset a client. And quite often it’s hard to unravel what really matters and what doesn’t.
But this is the work of scaling. Subtracting cruft doesn’t just free up resources—it clarifies what’s essential and sets the stage for sustainable growth. The best-run teams have the discipline to ask not just What should we do? but also What should we stop doing?