When It's Time to Let Go Of Something You've Done For Years (Productive Flourishing Pulse #516)

Long-standing commitments can displace higher-value work — even when they've been successful. Case in point: why I'm indefinitely pausing this very newsletter.

Last week’s Pulse was about when it might be worth re-activating an old idea. This week’s Pulse is about pausing or dropping an active idea, project, or routine.

In this case, my decision to pause and/or retire the Weekly Pulse is the concrete example to cash out the idea. Given that we recently celebrated the 500th Pulse, there’s considerable inertia to keep it going.

Let’s start with the historical Why of the Pulse:

1. In years past, we were producing considerably more content: internal podcasts, external podcasts, and multiple posts per week. Readers couldn’t keep up.

2. We didn’t send all new content out to all subscribers. Given #1, I was concerned about content fatigue and being in people’s Inbox with too many long posts.

3. We had a different business model, in a different era of social blogging.

4. I had different views about in-content placement of our offers, at the same time that we didn't have the ecosystem of offers that we do now.

A lot’s changed in ten years.

Here’s where we are today:

1. I’m doing much more deep advising work with more clients.

2. I’m older and don't have the writing stamina and focus that I used to.

3. The topics that I write about now are more complex and nuanced.

4. Our readers have matured along with us, both professionally and personally.

5. The media/content landscape is much louder, jarring, and exhausting.

6. I feel like I’m past the “proving/performing” stage of my career. I’m not trying to get a seat at the table or proving why I deserve to be here/there. I do great work, on work and missions I care about, with people I care about — and my work isn’t my identity.

That last point got more air time because it’s much more of the organizing principle for where I am these days. The honest reckoning I’ve been thrashing with over the last couple of years is that so much of my overproduction and overworking has been tied to deeply internalized socialization around having to be best in class just to get a chance to play.

That’s the shadow side of the era of Black Excellence I was molded in and didn’t know it and thus couldn’t unpack it until I couldn’t carry it anymore. But that’s a much deeper conversation for another day and context.

This summer’s writing has been easy and difficult at the same time. It was easy because I’m closest to my own experiences and thoughts. It was difficult because every week, I’ve wondered whether the content I was sharing fit the content of the Pulse. The more reflective and sharing-what-I’m-living Pulses didn’t feel like they were “enough” (whatever that means) and as I’ve shifted back into my August and fall vibe, the more prescriptive Pulses didn’t feel like they were Pulses because they could’ve been standalone posts (whatever that means).

My thrashing about this simple question — “Is this a Pulse or nah?” — led me down some backways to the destination that the Pulse as a weekly container has outlived its usefulness. It’s displacing other, higher-value work that clients, colleagues, teammates, and my inner muses are hounding me about, at the same time that it’s creating an artificial urgency that's no longer worth the cost.

That we’ve done something more than 500 times doesn’t mean that it makes sense to keep doing it. It could’ve been the wrong thing to focus on for the 500+ iterations before. It could’ve been exactly the right thing to do for those 500+ iterations. Either way, I can’t make a strong enough case to prioritize it over other projects. As I said in Start Finishing: to trade up, you have to let go.

So I’m indefinitely pausing the Pulse and am open to this being the last Pulse. I’m also open to conditions changing and/or getting information that shows that it’s doing more work for all of us and deserves to get back into the project cagematch.

I may end up publishing weekly-ish or may fall into a different cadence that creates some breathing room to work on the books that I’m being hounded about. And a major part of bookwork that I want to get better at is bridging between books and doing a better job of bringing early readers into the journey. This takes a lot of time but is time well spent.

I’ll also keep experimenting with non-performative sharing-what-I’m-living when it serves the work. Last week’s Pulse is an example of what it looks like when I’ve edited my journey out of the content, though the actual impetus of that post was stuff my clients and I were/are grappling with.

I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. There’s a gift in not knowing.

Over to you:

Is there a project or routine you’ve been doing for years that no longer serves its original purpose? What’s keeping you from letting it go?

~Charlie

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