On Sunday morning, The Stacks was still running on my Mac mini. Four days earlier, I’d canceled the plan to move my book tracking into it. I checked the app while writing this article, and it responded normally.
I’d built it to replace Shelf, the book tracker I already used. The Stacks read over 500 media notes from my vault, tracked television episodes and had a whole retro video-rental-store design. I kept opening Shelf instead of my new project, The Stacks.
The Stacks also had a maintenance job scheduled for 5:00 every morning. Its last recorded result was a failure. The log file I expected wasn’t there. While I was preparing to write about clearing four projects, a computer was still keeping appointments for one I didn’t use.
The decisions were easy enough
During my project review, I canceled Food Coach, Backtime, my Mojito fork and the Shelf-to-Stacks migration. They’d seemed useful when I started them. Looking at what I actually used made the decisions fairly obvious.
Food Coach was supposed to make food logging easier. I built the app, then never finished the account setup. Backtime worked backward from a deadline to tell me when to start each step. I installed Whendy on my phone instead. With Mojito, I built custom emoji shortcodes into my own version of an existing Mac app, then never tested the feature. The original Mojito already did enough.
The Stacks was the biggest build. Canceling the migration was still easy to explain: I didn’t use it. This was the same overlap I’d written about in The Great App Consolidation: What Happens When You Actually Cut Your Stack, except this time I had built the unnecessary alternative myself.
But I gave the decision soft edges. I canceled the migration while leaving The Stacks available and running as-is, with no further work planned. When I checked my dashboard on Sunday, two canceled projects were still marked “Waiting.”
I canceled four commitments and turned off zero things.
What I actually gained
I didn’t recover hours. I wasn’t spending hours on these projects anymore. What changed was how many directions I felt obliged to face at once. My attention narrowed toward the events site and this newsletter, although the events site’s progress had started before the review. I can’t credit the cancellation for work already underway.
Removing those commitments mattered. Closing them out was unfinished. I wrote seven checks from the loose ends I found, and none of the four projects passes all seven yet. This is the checklist I’m taking into my next review. I haven’t used it to finish closing one yet.
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I really enjoyed this. There’s something so human about making the decision to let something go… and then discovering all the little threads still quietly attached to it. That line — “I canceled four commitments and turned off zero things” — captures it beautifully.