Eliminate Before You Optimise — Don’t Be a Doorstop

Efficiency can hide avoidance

Optimisation feels intelligent. New tools, systems and shortcuts create visible motion. But making an unnecessary task faster only makes you more efficient at spending attention on something that should not exist.

The harder question comes first: if we stopped doing this, what would actually break?

Use the four decisions

Put recurring work through four decisions in order: eliminate it, simplify it, automate it, then delegate it. The order matters. Automation and delegation preserve the shape of the task; elimination challenges the shape itself.

Start with the calendar. Meetings, reports and routines survive because they are familiar, not because anyone can still name the result they create.

Goals need subtraction

Every meaningful goal competes with other reasonable uses of your time. A plan that names only what you will do is incomplete. Name what you will stop, postpone or disappoint.

Focus is not the ability to care about one thing. It is the willingness to let several good things remain undone so the most important thing can become real.