One In, One Out

Dharmesh Shah describes an early HubSpot rule: "Every time you added what we thought of as a knob or dial, called a feature, you had to take one out somewhere else."

Apply this to your family rules.

You want to add "no phones at dinner"? Great. What rule are you removing? You want to add "homework before screens"? Cool. What goes away?

Without this discipline, you're just accumulating rules. And accumulating rules means accumulating enforcement burden, which means accumulating exhaustion, which means rules stop getting enforced, which means you're just yelling into the void.

"It's better than nothing," Dharmesh says. "It's better than having no constraints."

Your family doesn't need more rules. It needs fewer, better-enforced ones. If you can't figure out what to remove, that tells you something important: maybe the new rule isn't actually that critical.

Simplicity is worth fighting for. Even when - especially when - it feels easier to just add one more thing.