My first blog of 2025, and following my annual procedure I have created a new archive for this year’s posts. Then I reviewed all posts that didn’t get published last year. Among all the posts you will have enjoyed last year there are half as many again which didn’t get published. Half a dozen have been carried over but most, about 4 times as many have been discarded.
A few of these are completely written posts awaiting a final edit but which I decided weren’t worth publishing.
A few more are posts I started to write but decided to they were too off-topic or too personal.
A few more never got beyond the first sketch.
And the remainder never got beyond the title and a note or two.
Broadly I’m following the same pattern I have been advocating with OKRs and Backlogs: decide your goals, drive work from goals and discard the backlog every few months. Let ideas go makes space for new ones, and if any are so great that I really should have them, then I’m sure I’ll think of them again.
It occurred to me the other day that this is the same logic I use with newspapers. I still buy and read a physical newspaper several times a week. There are several reasons I like the physical versions but one of them is the timeliness of it.
I buy the newspaper in the morning. The news has been curated for me: I don’t go hunting across websites to find news I might like. Then, at the end of the day the paper goes in the recycling. If I didn’t read a piece then too late. I had 14 hours to read it, tomorrow is new day with new news.
In all these cases it is only by letting go of the past – of ideas and partially done work which I’ve invested in – that I have space for the new. I wager that new ideas will be worth more than those of the past which didn’t make the grade. I accept that I might loose a few valuable ideas but I also know that if they are really good I’ll probably think of them again.
Now a question: are our technologies keeping the past alive too long?
Since my blogging is all electronic it would cost nothing to keep those old blog ideas hanging around. Similarly our backlogs only became bottomless pits when we stopped writing them on index cards.
Digital newspaper allow you to read today’s news, some of tomorrow’s and any day in the past – this means navigating them can be hard. I’m regularly struck by the way many blogs and online journals hide the publication date.
Facebook makes it hard to loose friends and LinkedIn makes it hard to forget past work colleagues. We are captive to past posts, pictures and comments.
Forgetting has a role to play in letting in the new and allowing us to advance.
Just because we can keep the past current should we? I don’t think so. Even if it costs nothing in terms of storage and archives the past makes it harder to see what is before us because we are trying to see so much more.
(Image from Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash)