When the name is wrong, the thinking is too

Yesterday I spent an hour just renaming things.

Not building anything new. Not fixing something visibly broken. Just going through several parts of one of the businesses I run and correcting what things were called — names that had drifted from what they actually were, sometimes weeks ago, sometimes longer.

It's the kind of work that doesn't make it into any highlight reel. You can't show it to a customer. Nobody congratulates you.

But the gap between what you call something and what it actually is doesn't sit there quietly. It accumulates. Every time you touch a thing with the wrong name, you do a small mental translation — what it says, what it means, which is which. If you're the only one touching it, that's one tax rate. When other people get involved, the rate multiplies.

In a one-person business, the most dangerous version of this isn't operational. It's the story you tell yourself about what you're building. The name you give to your current phase. The label you attach to a problem you haven't actually solved yet. When the name drifts from the reality, your decisions start drifting too.

Dijkstra said simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability. I used to read that as advice about systems design. I've come to think it means something broader.

A complicated name — or the wrong name — is usually a signal that the underlying thing isn't fully understood yet. When you finally understand something, you can say it simply. When you can say it simply, other people can act on it reliably. Including the future version of you who will be tired, or distracted, or under pressure.

Cleanup is not a detour

I've noticed that this kind of clarifying work almost always precedes a period of faster movement. Not because I planned it that way. Because you can't scale something you haven't named correctly — at some point the wrong label creates a bottleneck, a confusion, a moment where a decision routes to the wrong place.

The entropy comes from everywhere. Names that made sense in month one. Structures inherited from a version of the business that no longer exists. Decisions made under pressure that left behind labels nobody questioned because they sort of worked.

I used to defer this work as long as possible, treating it as vanity or perfectionism. It isn't. It's the prerequisite for the next thing being any cleaner than the last.