This is the time of year when my kids go off to camp. While they’re gone, I usually take the opportunity to clear out their rooms, sort through old toys in the attic, and generally work on the house without a lot of distraction.
One year we managed to clear several van loads of stuff while they were away. We deliberately didn’t mention it, just to see how long it took anyone to notice things were missing.
It took almost six months.
Six months before a single one of them said anything. And these were things they had insisted, at various points, that they absolutely had to keep. When they finally asked, we told them we’d sold their toys for chocolate. They didn’t believe us, which was unfortunate, because it was true.
Since then I take the opportunity most times they’re out of the house for a stretch. Last autumn I moved everyone into different bedrooms and threw out bins and bags and boxes of it — old make-up, broken toys, and a remarkable quantity of ordinary rubbish. Every time, it feels liberating. It gives us room to breathe.
So while the kids are away, mom is going to play. Just not in the way they’d imagined.
The six months is the interesting part
I told that story for years as a joke about children and clutter. It’s actually a much more useful observation than that, and it applies almost exactly to a business.
The things they swore they needed were not missed for half a year. Not because they were lying — because the feeling of needing something and actually needing it are different, and only one of them can be tested by removal.
You cannot find out which is which by asking. Ask a child whether they need a toy and the answer is yes, every time. Ask anyone whether a report, a meeting, a process or a tool is necessary, and you’ll get the same answer, for the same reason. Nobody wants to be the person who said no and turned out to be wrong.
The only reliable test is to stop and see whether anything breaks.
What this looks like in a business
Most companies accumulate exactly the way a child’s bedroom does. Nothing arrives with an expiry date, nobody is responsible for removal, and everything has a plausible reason it’s still there.
- The weekly report nobody reads. Somebody asked for it in 2019. That person may not work there any more. It still gets produced.
- The recurring meeting that stopped having a purpose. Still in the calendar, still attended, still 45 minutes.
- The software you’re paying for monthly. Two people use it. One of them left.
- The approval step that exists because of one incident nobody present remembers.
- The service line you keep because a client might ask, though none has for two years.
Each of these has a defender if you raise it in a meeting. That’s precisely why asking doesn’t work.
The removal test
The camp version, applied to a company: stop doing it quietly and see who notices.
- Pick something reversible. A report, a meeting, a step in a process. Not anything with legal, financial or safety implications — those aren’t candidates for this.
- Stop, without announcing it. An announcement produces objections from people imagining the loss, which is the thing you’re trying to bypass.
- Set a review date. Thirty days. Write it down, because otherwise you’ll forget you did it, which is its own answer.
- See who asks. If someone does, you’ve learned it matters and to whom. Reinstate it, now knowing its actual purpose.
- If nobody asks, it’s gone. Don’t reinstate it out of guilt.
In my experience, roughly the same proportion applies as in the bedrooms. Most of it isn’t missed. Some small part turns out to be genuinely load-bearing, and you find out cheaply rather than by theorising.
Why this is a leadership job specifically
Nobody below you will do it.
An employee who quietly stops producing a report has taken a risk with no upside — if it turns out someone wanted it, that’s their problem, and if nobody wanted it, nobody thanks them. The incentives run entirely toward carrying on.
So accumulated work removes itself only when the person who can absorb being wrong about it decides to test it. That’s you.
Which makes subtraction one of the few genuinely non-delegable jobs in a business, alongside deciding what it’s for and who works in it. It also never appears on anyone’s priority list, because it produces nothing you can point to — just a business that is slightly lighter than it was.
Same as the van loads. Nobody noticed for six months. Everyone had more room to breathe immediately.
