THE SHORTCUT DOCTRINE

Stop Making Things Hard for Yourself

We have a strange relationship with difficulty. We confuse it with value.

If something takes a long time, requires multiple steps, and demands patience, we tend to trust it more. We assume the complexity means something important is happening.

We've been trained to equate friction with rigour - and easy with shortcuts.

That word.

Shortcuts.

Notice the slight flinch you might feel when you hear it. The subtle implication that you're cutting corners. Taking the easy way out.

Being a little bit lazy.

I want to argue the opposite.

A shortcut is not a compromise. It is a commitment to the thing that actually matters, at the expense of everything that doesn't.

The complexity trap

Look at your average analytics dashboard. Your standard reporting workflow. Your morning routine. Your inbox.

Most of what fills the frame is not load-bearing.

It is not making the structure stronger. It is just there - accumulated residue from decisions made for forgotten reasons, never questioned, never removed.

Organisations are especially good at this.

They build processes to solve problems, then keep the processes long after the problems have vanished. New layers are added on top of old ones. Meetings multiply. Templates proliferate. The overhead grows, and the actual work - the thing the organisation exists to do - gets harder to find.

This is not entropy. Entropy is passive.

This is something more deliberate: we add complexity because it feels like progress.

More steps mean more control.

More options mean more flexibility.

More data means better decisions.

Except it doesn't. Not usually.

Few cultures measure success by the extent of the bureaucracy.

Simple things gets done

Here is a truth so obvious it barely needs saying, and yet gets ignored everywhere I look: the simpler something is, the more likely it is to actually happen.

If you want people to read your report, make it one page. If you want to remember something, write it in one sentence. If you want to build a habit, reduce it until it cannot be made smaller.

A workout you will do beats a perfect workout you won't.

A decision made today beats an optimised decision made in three weeks after four more stakeholder reviews.

Shortcuts are not about being sloppy. They are about being honest about the friction that stands between intention and action - and systematically removing it.

80% of the complexity in most systems serves the remaining 20% of edge cases, rarely. Simplify for the majority. Let the edge cases come to you.

Less is still more

The "less is more" philosophy gets misread as minimalism for its own sake. Bare walls. Empty desks. The aesthetic of having removed things.

That is the surface.

The actual principle is more demanding: ruthlessly prioritise what creates value, and eliminate everything else without sentimentality.

This requires more thinking, not less.

Deciding what to keep is harder than accumulating. It means you have to know what you're optimising for. You have to have an opinion about what matters.

You have to be willing to kill your darlings - the clever process, the comprehensive framework, the beautiful spreadsheet that nobody actually uses.

I work with organisations that have genuinely lost the thread.

They cannot tell you, clearly, what their analytics is for. They have every tool. They measure everything. They sit in dashboards for hours.

And they cannot make a simple decision about their business because the signal is buried in the noise of their own thoroughness.

The goal is not to have nothing.

The goal is to have exactly what you need - and know immediately where it is.

What a real shortcut looks like

A real shortcut begins with an honest question: what is the minimum I need to achieve the actual outcome?

Not the deliverable. Not the artefact. The outcome.

The thing that changes in the world because this work exists.

That question is uncomfortable because it often reveals that most of what you're doing doesn't connect to an outcome at all. It connects to a process.

A habit.

An assumption about what professionalism looks like. A fear of being seen as someone who didn't do enough.

THE SHORTCUT TEST:

Take your most complex recurring task. Write down every step. Then ask - if I removed half of these steps, what would actually break? You will find the answer is usually: not much.

Do the experiment.

Report back.

FIVE PLACES TO START CUTTING

1. YOUR REPORTING.

Every metric that doesn't connect to a decision should be removed or archived. If seeing the number doesn't change what you do, stop reporting it. You are not measured on the comprehensiveness of your measurement.

2. YOUR MEETINGS.

Most of what happens in meetings could be an email. Most of what could be an email doesn't need to exist at all. If a meeting doesn't have a stated decision to be made, it probably should not happen. Protect your most expensive resource - collective attention - like it is scarce. It is.

3. YOUR TOOLS.

The tool stack is where good intentions go to die. Every platform you add creates dependencies, learning curves, and maintenance overhead. Before adopting anything new, ask what you will stop using to make room for it. If the answer is nothing, the answer should be no.

4. YOUR EXPLANATIONS.

If your strategy document requires a long explanation to be understood, the strategy itself is not clear enough. The explanation is a symptom. Go back and simplify the thing, not the description of it.

5. YOUR DECISIONS.

Most decisions that feel big are not actually that consequential. The reversible ones should be made quickly, with the best available information, and revisited if needed. Reserve your deliberation for the truly irreversible. Most decisions are not irreversible.

The permission you were waiting for

If you work in an organisation, there is a good chance that you have added complexity to signal effort. That you have built frameworks to demonstrate rigour. That you have written long documents when a short conversation would have done it. That you have made your work look thorough because you were not confident that simple would be trusted.

I understand this.

Really.

It is rational behaviour in environments that reward visible effort over actual outcome.

But it is worth naming clearly for what it is: theatre. Expensive, exhausting theatre that crowds out the actual work.

The shortcut - the genuinely, honestly short path from problem to outcome - is not lazy. It is skilled.

It is the product of enough experience to know what matters, enough confidence to stop performing, and enough discipline to keep removing things until only the essential remains.

That is not the easy way out.

That is the hard way in.