On a client call this Thursday, the founder said something that made the whole team laugh.

We're wrapping up with a fairly big project where we custom built an entire Notion workspace for an 8-figure E-com business owner with their team spread across 3 continents, spending $1000’s per day on ads, and running a business that's grown faster than their operations could keep up with.

Every call, Jack and I walk the founders through what we've built since last time. New department dashboards, production automations, and buttons that fire off an entire launch checklist with one click.

And on Thursday, one of the founders was getting impatient, in the best way possible.

He said watching the dashboard come together felt like watching a pretty woman slowly get undressed in front of you. You see a shoulder, then a little more, and you're not allowed to touch yet. "It's a good tease" he said.

Funny compliment but I’ll take it.

The reason why they can’t “touch” the dashboard yet is because we’re in the phase nobody has the patience for: the cut.

From our experience, building a Business OS in Notion happens in 2 phases, and most people have absolutely no idea how to do the second.

Phase 1: The bulk

This is where we go through all their Google Drives, SOPs, talk with their team, and overall just digest their entire business trying to understand it from the inside-out. Then we go ahead and build systems around all of it and just adding as much databases, properties, views, and templates as possible so that everything you possible need to do, you can.

You're not trying to be elegant here. You're trying to get everything out of the founder and team’s heads into one place and build a system around it. This phase feels productive because you're adding, and adding feels like progress.

Phase 2: The cut

You go back through everything you just built and you delete. Not just properties and views but entire databases. You try to ruthlessly eliminate as much as possible and simplify the entire workspace almost to the point where all that’s left is just a button to click. That’s what our clients pay us for. They’re already overwhelmed so the last thing they want is a complex system to figure out, they want simplicity.

Earlier this week, before that call, Jack and I went through the back end of their workspace and deleted around 60% of the databases that we ended up simplifying, integrating into a different database or just eliminating entirely. Deleting isn’t losing progress, it is the progress.

The clarity of simplicity far outweighs the value of complexity.

Deleting is progress. Every property, view, or template you delete is one less thing your team has to look at, think about, and decide on before they can do the actual work. Every database you remove is one less thing to maintain and update. You're removing the noise to the point where only the signal is left.

This is the thing I keep coming back to: you can't systemize complexity.

Clarity is what drives action, and in a Notion workspace, clarity isn't something you add. It's what's left over after you delete everything that was in the way.

To say it differently, the system isn’t finished when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to remove.

A bloated system doesn't get used. People open it, feel the weight of it, and quietly go back to their spreadsheets and WhatsApp threads. A simple system gets used because using it is easier than not using it.

That's why we’re the best at what we do. We not only build a good Notion dashboard, but we actually build the one your team will open on Monday and use.

So if your Notion is a graveyard of half-built databases right now, you probably don't have a building problem. You did the bulk, you just never made time to cut. You don't need to add more to fix it, you need to remove.

Focus is saying no.
Clarity comes from simplifying.

If you want help building a system that's actually simple enough to use, the kind that gives you and your team clarity instead of one more thing to manage, just book a free AIOS audit for your business with us here:

No fluff. Just systems.
Chris "The Systemizer" Punt