Barnacles

Barnacles attach themselves to ship hulls.

Left alone, they accumulate.

More drag, more fuel, slower speeds.

Ships don't scrape barnacles daily….But ignore them long enough and you're burning twice the fuel to go half the speed.

Growing businesses collect barnacles too.

Old form fields nobody fills out. Process steps added three years ago for a problem that doesn't exist anymore. Software seats for people who left. Features you built once and forgot about. The extra approval layer. The cc on every email.

None of it happens on purpose. It just accumulates.

You can't add your way out of barnacles. You have to scrape.

Take an hour. Take a day. Tell your team to find one thing that doesn't need to be there anymore and get rid of it. A field in a form. A step in a process. A report nobody reads. A meeting that should be an email.

Things are done when nothing else can be removed, not when nothing else can be added.

Simpler is almost always better. And it's almost always hiding underneath what you already have.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

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