Minimalism, at its core, is subtraction. And nowhere does subtraction matter more than in getting things done.
Friction is the biggest enemy. Not laziness, not lack of talent—friction. The meeting you scheduled that could have been an email. The app you downloaded to manage the app you already had. The extra step in the SOP that made someone feel important once and then just... stayed. Most tools marketed as time-savers are actually time-thieves in disguise. I'd wager 90% of productivity products add more minutes to your day than they remove. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have tried enough to know that.
This isn't just about productivity in the narrow sense—inbox zero, Pomodoro timers, color-coded calendars. I mean productivity in the broadest sense: reaching a goal effectively. A logo's job is recognition. A commute's job is getting you home. A company's job, ultimately, is creating value for clients and shareholders. Everything else is noise. Beautiful, ego-flattering, shelf-filling noise.
Here's the shift that changed how I see everything: stop treating obstacles and tools as different categories. Treat everything between you and your goal as an obstacle by default—until proven otherwise. Because think about it. If there's nothing between you and your goal, you're already there. The whole game, then, is deletion.
Most people do the opposite. They accumulate. More steps, more tools, more meetings, more stuff on the shelf. They mistake motion for progress. But the greatest designers, the clearest thinkers, the people who've actually found peace—you walk into their space and there's almost nothing there. Not because they can't afford more. Because they've been through the other side. They bought the stuff. They felt the weight. And they learned.
That journey—from addition to subtraction—is not painless. It's genuinely hard to throw away something you once believed in. It's emotional. Letting go of a tool you championed, a process you built, an object you loved—that costs something. But that discomfort is exactly where clarity lives.
So now, every single day, I make it a practice: cancel a subscription, sell something on eBay, cut a step from a workflow, remove a word from a sentence. Ten things gone. Every day. Not as punishment—as momentum. Because when you're buried under stuff, physically or mentally, you can't move. I've walked into living rooms so packed with things I got a headache just standing there. That's not a home. That's a storage unit with a couch.
Start with the goal. Ask what it actually is—not what it feels like, not what looks impressive, but what it truly is. Then look at everything between you and that goal and ask: does this need to exist? Most of it doesn't. The answer, almost always, is to remove something, not add it.
When in doubt, subtract.