Housekeeping Ideas for the End of the Year: Eliminate Ruthlessly

I stole the concept of Eliminating Ruthlessly from Shane Parrish’s Annual Reflection Framework:

Most people attempt to do too many things. The problem is that too many priorities divide your attention, reduce the quality of your work, and stress you out. On top of that, none of them seem to get done.

In my case, I could make a list of specific incantations of “attempting to do too many things”. For example, for me being curious is essential for learning new things, but that doesn’t mean that anything I do for curiosity’s sake should be justified.

I’ve formally incorporated four specific processes around eliminating ruthlessly to this year’s end review:

• RSS feeds subscriptions. I went through every feed I was subscribed to and considered if the information offered was still relevant to me and aligned with my current goals. I deleted about 30% of the feeds. I further divided the remaining feeds into three categories: feeds I read daily, feeds I read every week, and feeds I read… sometime in the future.
• Newsletter subscriptions. I unsubscribed from a lot of newsletters. I also deleted past unread newsletters…
• People I follow on Twitter/X and other social networks. On X I was following over 900 accounts, now I’m down to around 600. Still a lot but I perceive that my X timeline is now more related to my current interests.
• Apps. I went through all the apps installed on my laptop and deleted everything I was not using. The same for my phone and tablet.

The most important list for me, however, is the list of projects I’m not going to push forward this year. These are the ones that would dilute my energy and keep me from accomplishing what’s important to me.