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Notes09 April 20264 min read

Three things I stopped doing in 2026

Three small habits I caught myself in last year that quietly bled hours off every project. Killing them was one of the highest-leverage changes I made in 2026.

First: I stopped writing project plans before the first deployed URL existed. Plans built on imagined screens are fiction. Plans built on a live URL that the client has scrolled are real. Now every project starts with a one-hour hero-and-nav deploy, and the plan is written against that artifact.

Second: I stopped recommending CMSes by default. Most marketing sites have ten pages, change twice a year, and pay a £20-a-month CMS tax for the rest of their life so a freelancer doesn't have to do an MDX deploy. For most of my clients I now ship hard-coded content with a clean editing path, and save them four grand over five years.

Third: I stopped saying 'we' when 'I' was honest. The studio is one person on a fast clock. Saying 'we' to sound bigger is a small lie that wears badly across a six-week project. Clients pick the studio because they want to talk to the engineer; pretending there's a team behind me undercuts the very thing they bought.