Good enough is a subscription you didn’t mean to buy.
It feels like a bargain on day one. Then it starts billing you monthly.
Most teams don’t see it until they try to move fast.
Every system has decisions that were “good enough” at the time. Most of them are now costing you money, time, or sanity.
And almost nobody is tracking the cost.
That’s the tax.
What the Tax Actually Is
When you accept a shortcut, you’re not avoiding work. You’re deferring it.
And deferred work accrues interest.
The tax shows up as friction: extra steps in a process that nobody remembers why they exist, manual workarounds that became “just how we do things,” tools that almost fit but require constant adjustment.
It’s invisible until you try to move fast.
Then it’s everywhere.
The dangerous part is that the tax feels normal. Teams adapt. They route around the friction without naming it. The cost gets absorbed into “how long things take around here.”
Three Ways Good Enough Gets Expensive
1) The integration you bolted on instead of built right.
A team needed two systems to talk to each other. They hacked together a script that pulled data from one and pushed it to the other. It ran on someone’s laptop via a scheduled task.
It worked. Good enough.
Fast forward: that person left. The laptop got replaced. The script broke. Nobody knew where the source code was. The two systems had drifted apart in their data formats.
Fixing it took multiple engineers and weeks of work—plus an audit to figure out how much data had been silently dropped along the way.
That’s what “good enough” buys you: a cheap start and an expensive rescue.
2) The access controls you meant to tighten later.
Someone needed access to a production system to debug an issue. Easiest fix: broad permissions. The ticket said “temporary.”
That was two years ago.
Now twelve people have admin access who shouldn’t. An auditor flags it. The cleanup requires reviewing every account, understanding who actually needs what, and coordinating changes across teams who built their workflows around the current setup.
The original shortcut took five minutes.
The cleanup took a full quarter.
3) The process you documented “enough to get started.”
A team wrote a quick runbook for a new deployment process. It covered the happy path. Edge cases were left as “ask Sarah.”
Sarah got promoted. The new person didn’t know to ask. They hit an edge case, made a bad call, and caused an outage.
The post-mortem wasn’t complicated. The runbook wasn’t real. The knowledge was trapped in people’s heads. Rebuilding it required chasing details across multiple people—none of whom remembered the same sequence the same way.
Documentation debt is still debt.
“But isn’t MVP basically good enough?”
Sometimes, yes. And that’s the point!
An MVP is “good enough” on purpose: small scope, clear tradeoffs, and a plan for what comes next.
Here’s the difference:
MVP is constrained product.
Good-enough tax is unconstrained debt.
The tax shows up when “good enough” becomes a place you live.
When the shortcut becomes the system.
When “temporary” turns into default—and nobody owns the cleanup.
Ship small. Move fast. Just don’t pretend the bill won’t show up.
Five Questions to Spot the Tax
Use these when you’re making decisions—or reviewing ones already made.
What happens when the person who knows this leaves?
If the answer is “we’ll figure it out,” you’re already paying the tax.How many manual steps does this process have?
Each one is a place where errors hide and time disappears.When was the last time we questioned why we do it this way?
If nobody remembers, the original reason may no longer apply.What will this cost when it breaks at the worst possible time?
Because it will.Who is tracking this as a known gap?
If it’s not written down, it’s not managed. It’s just hoped.
What to Do About It
You can’t fix everything. That’s not the point.
The point is to stop pretending the tax doesn’t exist.
Name it. Track it. Make conscious decisions about what you’re willing to pay—and what’s going to cost you more than it’s worth.
You don’t need to fix it all. You just need to see it clearly.
Start by looking at the systems, processes, and decisions you’ve inherited. Ask the five questions. Write down what you find.
Then decide where to draw your line.
If you’re new here, start with Start Here to understand what this site is about.
To understand why I think boundaries matter, read The Line.