When faced with a problem, we add. A new process to stop the thing going wrong again. A tool to manage the complexity created by the previous tool. A meeting to coordinate the people the last reorganisation separated. There is research suggesting this is close to a cognitive default: when asked to improve something, people reliably reach for addition and barely consider subtraction, even when removal is the obviously better move.

I see this most clearly in software architecture, where the best change available is frequently the deletion of something. This is where YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) comes from. Deletions almost never happen, partly because nobody is rewarded for them and partly because someone built the thing and is still in the room. But the same pattern runs through organisations, where the standard response to dysfunction is a new layer of process, and through personal lives, where the response to being overwhelmed is a better system for managing the overwhelm rather than the removal of some of its causes.

What makes subtraction hard is that it is invisible and slightly insulting. An addition is a visible contribution with your name on it. A removal produces nothing you can point to, and frequently implies that a past decision was wrong. So the habit worth building is to force the question rather than wait for it to occur to you: before adding anything, ask what could be taken away instead. Sometimes the answer is nothing. Often it is one of the three things you added last year for reasons nobody now remembers. So, as a reflection for today: what would you remove, if removing were as respectable as adding?