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Sep 2026 · Short · 0:52 · 1 min read

I deleted 91 tasks and shipped more that week

Ninety-one open items, none of them scheduled. The delete rule that replaced my backlog.


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My task list had ninety-one things on it. I counted. Not one of them had a date, and eleven were older than the app I was tracking them in.

So I wrote a rule instead of a system. Anything untouched for twenty-eight days is deleted at six on Monday morning. No archive, no review queue, no are-you-sure. If it matters it comes back, because whatever made you write it down will happen again.

First Monday it deleted ninety-one tasks. Four came back. That is the real number — four. The other eighty-seven were me being unwilling to admit I was never going to do them.

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