Clean the Kitchen

The fastest way to be done with dinner is to not clean the kitchen.

If you don’t clean the kitchen, a mess builds up. In order to make dinner, you have to fumble through dirty pots and pans—chiselling off dried spaghetti from last Tuesday, melting hardened peanut butter out of spoons. But eventually you will find the pots, pans, and dishes you need, and you will eat dinner.

And still, the fastest way to be done with dinner is to not clean the kitchen.

This fundamental truth never changes. You can always be done faster today if you don’t clean the kitchen today.

This is why skipping cleanup keeps winning. What’s measured is dinner getting done. The moment. The outcome. The immediate result. Not how hard it was to get there, and not how much harder it made the next dinner.

The same thing happens when decisions are made under pressure. There isn’t enough time. There isn’t enough understanding yet. Exploration is cut short because something has to ship. Choices are made with partial information, and cleanup is deferred because it would slow things down now.

And it works.

Dinner happens. Features ship.

On the other hand, if you clean the kitchen after dinner every day, the total time spent making dinner over a year will be far less.

But that gain only shows up over time—and time over time is rarely what’s being measured. The mess doesn’t appear immediately. It accumulates quietly, showing up later as friction.

Eventually, more effort goes into working around the kitchen than into cooking. The response is to rearrange things. To change the layout. To find a faster path through the clutter.

In software, this is when code gets refactored. In organizations, this is when teams and responsibilities get restructured. The kitchen gets rearranged to make tomorrow feel possible.

These aren’t failures. They’re the delayed cost of many reasonable decisions optimized for now, made before the problem was fully understood.

And still—the fastest way to be done with dinner is to not clean the kitchen.

Until what you’re mostly doing is cleaning.