Subtract until it holds.

More tools is not more capacity. It is more tax.

I was four years old, sitting on the back of a lorry with our motorcycle, watching my whole life get driven out of Johor Bahru.

My father was a postman. My mother stayed home and looked after other people’s kids for extra income. We were moving to my father’s kampung, to live with my late grandmother in a wooden house.

There were no smartphones. No internet. Just cousins, the free TV channels, and a kitchen with a roof made of woven leaves instead of zinc.

That kitchen was the coolest room in the house.

The leaves let air pass through. Zinc traps it. Anyone who has stood under a zinc roof at two in the afternoon knows exactly what I mean.

Inside, an earthen stove fired with firewood sat next to a gas stove. Between them they cooked everything — fried rice, boiled cassava, whatever there was.

I didn’t grow up with much.

I never once felt like I was missing anything.

Thirty-two years later I was sitting at my desk at 10pm, after work, after dinner, after the kids were down, trying to figure out why I felt so behind.

I had six social media accounts. Three places I kept notes. Two AI tools. A to-do system I set up carefully once and had not opened in months.

Every single one of them was an upgrade on paper.

I opened my phone that night and I could not tell you which one of them was actually doing anything for me.

So two weeks ago I deactivated all of them except LinkedIn.

Not because the others were bad. Because I could not give any of them my full attention while splitting it six ways. I was paying for six and getting the benefit of none.

The zinc roof looks like the upgrade. It traps more heat.

Here is what I think is actually going on with most of us. We do not have a shortage of tools. We have an oversupply of half-used ones.

And every tool you are supposed to be using is a small tax on your attention. You pay it daily, whether you open the app or not. You pay it in the two seconds of guilt when you see the icon.

If you are trying to build something of your own in the gaps of an already full week, that tax is the whole gap.

Here is what I did, in case it is useful.

I wrote down every tool and platform I was maintaining, including the ones I felt guilty about barely using. I picked the one that was already doing the most work for me — the one it would genuinely hurt to lose. Then I closed the rest that same week, while the decision was still fresh.

Not eventually. That week.

What I got back was not time, exactly. It was one less thing quietly asking for a piece of my attention every time I unlocked my phone.

The same week, I did something that felt unrelated and turned out not to be.

I wrote down seven rules about what I will not do in this business.

Not goals. Rules. Things like: nothing this business needs happens during my working hours. I stop at 11:30pm. The hour before my daughters go to sleep is theirs, not a negotiable block I can borrow during a busy week.

I wrote them because of a question I had never asked myself.

Every time I have considered an opportunity, I stress-tested it for failure. What if this doesn’t work? What if I waste the money? What if nobody buys?

I had never once asked the other one.

What if it works?

I got that question from Justin Welsh.

Because a thing can go exactly the way you hoped and still hand you something you do not want. A business that eats every evening. A side income that costs you the reason you wanted a side income. A calendar so full of good opportunities that there is no room left for the life they were supposed to fund.

I wrote the rules now, while I have almost nothing to protect. It is much easier to say no to an opportunity before it is sitting in front of you with money attached.

That is the same move as the roof.

Zinc is not a worse material. It is a worse choice for that kitchen. More is not worse. More is just more, and more has a cost that nobody prices for you.

Subtract until only the load-bearing wall is left standing.

Then build on that.

What is the one tool you already know you should cut, and haven’t?

That’s all for this week.
See you next Saturday.

Cheers,
Farhan