The Second Subtraction

Subsidy, a missing process, and the discipline replacing both this week – Monday Momentum

Friday did the subtraction on other people. This one does it on me.

Same instinct, turned toward my own week, finds two things filling it that shouldn’t be there. Some of it is subsidy, still, the pattern I named on Friday and haven’t fully cut. The rest is mine to own outright, no one extracting anything: work that stayed loose because I never gave it a shape, updates nobody had to chase because I never sent them.

Both cost the same thing. Time that looks like work and isn’t.

So the fix is as plain as the diagnosis. Less meetings, more status updates. A meeting is where two people go to feel like something happened. A status update is where one person writes down what actually did. I’m not cutting conversation, I’m cutting the version of it that stands in for output.

What’s left has to be bigger: outdoor and output, in that order, because the first feeds the second. That’s proper work. A lot of value creation. Then a lot more.

A few open projects come back into shape this week with that same discipline; the big ones that haven’t earned their value by their date get closed, not left to fade.

I’ll know by next Monday whether it held.