The Case for Pruning
Growth requires the discipline to subtract
3 min read
Every experienced gardener knows something that looks counterintuitive from the outside: the secret to growth is cutting things back.
You don't get a healthier plant by adding more water, more sunlight, more fertilizer, and hoping it all works out. You get a healthier plant by removing the dead branches, the overcrowded shoots, and the growth that's pulling energy away from the roots. What's left gets stronger because the plant can finally direct its resources where they matter.
Most founders I work with are running organizations that need a good pruning.
Growth Creates Overgrowth
Not because they've done anything wrong, but because growth creates overgrowth. Every new problem gets a new meeting. Every new initiative gets a new check-in. Every misalignment gets a new Slack channel or a new status update or a new reporting layer. These additions make sense one at a time, but they accumulate quietly until the calendar is full, the team is busy, and somehow nothing important is moving forward.
The numbers back this up. A Harvard study found that leaders spend an average of 23 hours a week in meetings. Research from Asana found that 60% of a knowledge worker's time is spent on work about work, things like status updates, chasing approvals, searching for information, and sitting in meetings that could have been an email. That means the majority of a team's energy is going toward coordination, not creation.
That's an overgrown garden.
The Instinct to Add
The instinct when things feel slow or stuck is almost always to add. Add a project tracker. Add a weekly sync. Add a new role to manage the complexity. And sometimes those additions are the right call. But more often than not, the real leverage is in removing the things that shouldn't be there anymore.
The meeting that made sense six months ago but no one has questioned since. The approval chain that exists because of a problem you already solved. The standing update that could be replaced by a shared document that takes two minutes to read. These aren't small things. They're the dead branches that are quietly absorbing your team's time and attention every single week.
What Pruning Actually Requires
Pruning takes discipline because it means looking at something your team is actively doing and deciding to stop. That feels risky. It feels like you might miss something. But the truth is, when you clear away the low-value activity, what remains gets the full attention it deserves, and the quality of the work changes.
Gardeners don't prune because they want less. They prune because they want better growth. The same principle applies to how your team spends its time. Protecting your team's capacity to do meaningful work is one of the most important things you can do as a leader, and it starts with being willing to cut.
Key Takeaway
Your team doesn't need more hours in the day. They need fewer things stealing the ones they have. When 60% of work time goes to coordination instead of creation, the answer isn't another tool or meeting. It's the discipline to prune what's no longer earning its place on the calendar.
If your team is busy but stuck, and you're not sure what to cut first, I'd welcome a conversation.