Yup, it’s 2025 and we have all the tech in the world but somehow pen and paper are still the most effective way to share an idea and Ross has captured that. The videos are way more human and approachable as a result. I think as we see more polished, highly produced content hit the scene, it’s going to be ideas like this that break through. What do we think?

It’s Mother’s Day weekend in the US that means spring is officially here and if your house is anything like mine that means spring cleaning is here too. We’re cleaning up the backyard, the garage, the basement, and anywhere else that’s a mess (which with 3 kids is everywhere).

It takes time to make the mess and it takes time to clean it. The problem is if you don’t take the time to clean then you’re just going to make a bigger mess which will make the job exponentially bigger later on.

“Dmitry who cares about your house?” you may be wondering. Well, guess what? You need to clean up at work too.

The cleaning doesn’t just happen at home—you need to do it at work too.

I’m not talking wiping down your desk or getting rid of all those coffee cups. I’m talking about paying back all of the creative debt you’ve accrued over the course of the year.

What is creative debt?

Whether we want to admit it or not, we take a lot of shortcuts. Sometimes it’s because there isn’t enough time to do the job the right way and sometimes it’s just because we don’t feel like it. Regardless, whenever we take a shortcut we start building up debt.

Debt is work we need to redo or clean up to make sure it’s ready for the next person or project. When you don’t pay down your debt one project impacts the next and all of a sudden you have a chain of shortcuts, bandaids, and duct tape holding things together. As you scale things start to break and rather than knowing where to go to fix them, you have to rework everything.

Rule of thumb: if you need a shortcut for a shortcut then you’ve created debt.

What does creative debt look like?

Each discipline has it’s own version of debt so I’ll share a few examples. I’m going to try and avoid the catastrophic versions of these but heads up, accruing enough debt can literally break your website or even your team when they’re the ones that have to pay it back.

Tech Debt

This is the one we talk about most so I’ll start here. Imagine you’re building a web page. What should happen is that you take your components or modules and reuse them to build the page that way everything is interconnected but if you’re in a rush maybe you code a button from scratch. No big deal in the moment but then you do a brand refresh and you realize that you’ve actually hardcoded 200 buttons across a number of pages and instead of updating a single component you’re now manually updating 200 buttons PLUS the component to catch up.

In wanting to save 5 minutes , you’ve created a week of work for yourself.

Design Debt

Big campaign comes up. It’s a rush—it always is! The current palette isn’t colorful enough. Let’s bust out the Coolors (not a typo). They look good, right? We’re moving fast and everyone is bought in. We’re moving so fast we forget to test the accessibility levels of the colors. All of a sudden you have a campaign that looks good but only to the people that can see it.

Instead of taking the time to test ahead of time now you’ve got to rework everything and so does everyone on video and dev.

Process Debt

Your intake process is working well, maybe too well. Most tickets aren’t that big a deal so you haven’t been sticking to the triage SLA. Your backlog is a disaster. Turns out amongst those requests is something from the CEO (let’s pretend they actually submitted the form!) and you missed it. These things tend to float to the top but wouldn’t you rather be proactive about it rather than having to scramble to figure out how to prioritize things?

How do you pay your debt back?

Nobody likes this answer but you need to make the time. There’s a few ways to do this.

The easy way is to set aside a few hours per week to knock out these tasks. This doesn’t actually work though and it’s because most of us aren’t disciplined enough to follow through.

We’ll set aside the time but then there’s a deadline or a meeting or something more fun comes up and we save it for next week. Next week becomes next month and nothing gets done other than more compounding debt.

You want to pay it off? Stop the work!

This is how most people react when you tell them to stop working on something new

Take a break from new projects

When I was at HubSpot you can imagine how much creative debt we picked up. Even when trying to do everything the right way, it just happened. What we started doing (and you may not need this much) was setting aside one week per quarter when all we would do is pay off our debt.

That’s right 40 hours per person to go back and clean up the messes they’ve made. We’d spend the weeks leading up to it putting a plan together, assigning tasks, and letting our partners know what was going on (don’t sleep on this part—make sure your self-service is tight).

This sort of became like a celebration for us because it was dedicated time we could focus on ourselves. It made the systems stronger and tighter and created opportunities for people who may not work together often to team up.

As counterintuitive as it might sound, we’d come out of these weeks energized and ready to take on whatever was next and you know what, I can’t even even take credit for this idea, the team came up with it.

What kind of creative debt should teams pay off?

Here’s a list of ideas for where to start:

1. Make sure your Figma components are up-to-date and used across your design system

2. Fix your padding and margins

3. Clean up your color palette (you don’t need 10 shades of gray)

4. Increase accessibility

5. Consider how localization affects your UX

6. Update Canva templates to use your Brand Kit

7. Fix your slide template

8. Refactor code to use reusable components and remove single references

9. Improve page speed issues

10. Review video templates, intros, outros, and lower thirds

11. Add graphics, animations, and icons to your Capsule and Riverside

12. Simplify everything (designs, templates, code, all of our work is a classic case of "I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time.")

13. Organize the DAM

14. Organize your shared drive

15. Review users and software access (creative debt can be real debt too)

16. Clean up your Asana/ClickUp/Monday backlog

17. Archive completed tasks and remove ones you won’t do

18. Update your intake forms and automations

19. Update documentation

20. Refine your Brand GPT

Every team is going to have different types of debt depending on what and how they’ve built their experiences but I promise you they’ll have debt. Take the time to clean it up so that you can routinely start and restart from a healthy place. You’ll be happy you did.

Sometimes the best way to pay off debt is to start from scratch. If you’re reading the above and feeling overwhelmed, please know that wasn’t the goal but if you’re looking to scale, you need to have the right systems in place (and they need to be clean).

If you’re at an inflection point and are looking for help getting to the next level, OhSnap! has your back.