I know you don’t care. Hell, I barely care. But it needs to be documented.
Even those things that you want to go away and are going away, you need to acknowledge the departure.
Let’s count the ways:
- “Good riddance!”
- “I don’t ever need to think about that again! Woo hoo!”
- “It’s off my desk, out of sight and out of mind.”
Thank you, WordPress U. It was a good run.
I’m on the down slope after descending to the depths of my work and then reaching the summit of my new career (“career” — such a silly word) and I’m tossing stuff overboard like it’s a sinking ship. But that’s where the analogy ends: I’m not on a sinking ship. If we’re going to go marine, how about a surfacing submarine?
I wouldn’t have realized that I spent somewhere around 4 years working on a website that did, well, I don’t what it did for me. It was the beginning of a project, maybe a course, maybe a blog or a course. Maybe a company, maybe something to sell or sell the whole thing. Whatever it was supposed to be, I’m not sure what it ever really amounted to.
This is both a birthday and a funeral.
This is a reminder that we can very easily spend time working on something that might turn into nothing. So here’s the moral: make sure you’re doing it for a reason other than just the “successful” outcome but rather to be enjoying the path to get there. Especially considering that one of the possible destinations is nowhere at all.
Bye bye past life.
Do I regret building that site and spending all of that time on it? Today? No. At the time, I remember working on it and enjoying planning what it might turn into. Would it be nicer if today it was “worth” something? Like, uh, money? Sure, that’d be great. But I’m also at the funeral and just so happy to see it all go away that I really no longer care about it in the least. In fact, today, as I write this and exported and imported all of the posts and did a one-line 301 wildcard redirect to send any straggling visitors to my branding site, it’s the most I’ve thought about the domain or the possible business or potential of whatever it was all about in years.
Maybe it’s like high school. You look back and think, “What was I thinking?” But then you shake your head and smile and don’t worry about it all too much. Goodbye WPU, thanks for the run while it lasted.
Post Mortem: I often talk of Bite-Size Change and how important it is when it builds up to Big Change. Sometimes it sneaks up on you and doesn’t even look like much, no fireworks or even screaming teenagers. But letting go of a project I worked on for several years? That’s Big Change.
