There are three kinds of darling worth killing: feature, process, and personal. The discipline of stopping is harder than starting, and it is the rate-limiting skill in any craft-led practice.
I should warn you, before we get into this one, that I have a diagnosis. ADD, medicated, the whole thing. This is relevant because it shapes how I am going to talk about the topic, which is the discipline of saying no to your own work, of killing things you are excited about, of not seeing every shiny idea through to completion. I have spent most of my professional life being structurally bad at this.
The frame I want to offer, before the diagnosis takes over the article, is this. The hardest skill in any craft-led discipline is knowing what to stop doing. It is harder than starting, harder than executing, harder than the work itself, because the work has its own forward momentum, and stopping requires you to put your hand on a moving thing and tell it no. People who are good at craft tend to be the worst at this, because they got good at the craft by not stopping, by riding the obsessive engine all the way to the bottom of the page. Telling them to develop a kill instinct is like telling a marathon runner to develop a sit-on-the-couch instinct. It is technically possible. It is also against the structural incentives of the body.
I will give you the typology I have come to use, because I find it useful. There are roughly three kinds of darling worth killing.
The first is the feature darling. This is a piece of product or design work you have fallen in love with, often after months of effort, that turns out to be solving a problem your customer does not have. Killing the feature darling is the easiest of the three, in theory, because the data is usually clear by the time the question comes up. It is the hardest in practice, because killing the feature darling means telling a team of people who built it that the months they spent are about to be put in a drawer. I have done this. From the inside, it feels like minor surgery. You make the cut, you do not over-explain, and you carry the weight of the decision so the team does not have to.
The second is the process darling. This is a meeting, a ritual, a doc template, a reporting cadence, a review forum, a thing you started two years ago to solve a problem that no longer exists, and that has continued to take an hour of your week ever since. Process darlings are hardest to identify because they have inertia and look productive. Killing one usually requires you to admit that the original problem is gone, which is itself a hard admission, because nobody wants to acknowledge that the elaborate scaffolding they built for last year’s emergency is now decorating the lawn.
The third, and the one I personally struggle with most, is the personal darling. This is the side project you started, the article you began drafting, the deck you keep meaning to finish, the small initiative you championed in a one-on-one and have not closed out. The personal darling is dangerous because it does not have a team around it. There is no public ceremony for killing it. It just lives in your head and weighs. The best you can do is develop a private practice for clearing them, which for me looks like a quarterly list, a hard look, and the willingness to write the words “letting this go” next to about half the items.
Here is the part where the ADD comes back in. I am, by neurology and by training, very good at starting things, medium at finishing them, and bad at killing them. The medication helps. The therapy helps. The list helps. None of them are sufficient, because the underlying engine that produces too many starts is also the engine that produces the work I am proud of, and turning the engine down would turn the whole thing down. The only practice that has actually worked is naming the problem out loud, repeatedly, to the people I work with, so they know to ask me about it. “What did you kill this week” is a better question, when asked by someone who actually wants to know, than any productivity system I have tried.
A surprise, to close. The most useful thing I ever did to improve my kill rate was learning to draw burners again. A burner, for the uninitiated, is a complicated full-color graffiti piece, the kind that takes hours and is judged by other writers on letter structure and color theory and connection. Most burners get abandoned halfway through. The wall gets painted over. The photo is the only thing that survives, if a photo even gets taken. Graffiti, as a discipline, taught me that abandonment is part of the practice. You do not finish every piece. You finish the ones the wall lets you finish, and you learn to walk away from the rest, and the walking away is itself a craft that can be developed. I have not gotten back to the same level on the wall that I was at twenty-five years ago. I am, however, much better at walking away.