How I made the decision to abort this project

Last Saturday, I started to work on a course about decision making. Its first lesson was about the decision matrix. The decision matrix is a tool to assess any decision based on two questions. First, is it consequential? Second, is it reversible? Answering these questions puts each decision in one of four quadrants:

• Consequential and reversible

• Inconsequential and reversible

• Consequential and irreversible

• Inconsequential and irreversible

Of all the decisions you're going to make, the consequential and irreversible decisions are the ones you should spend most of your time on. They will have a major impact on your life. It doesn't matter what you ate for lunch yesterday, but it matters what career you're pursuing. The most important decision I want to make, and the reason why I started to take this course, is about how I want to spend my creative time. One thing is clear to me: I don't want to spend it writing a daily post moaning that I have nothing to write about. This made me reconsider whether I should abort this project. I used the decision matrix to evaluate this decision.

Is it consequential?
It definitely isn't. There are three people subscribed to my newsletter (thanks, btw!), but it's currently broken and sends out random posts. Nobody is following this blog actively. And in two years, nobody will care about whether I wrote these posts for two more weeks or not.

The main reason I kept working on it for so long is that I wanted to be a professional. I believe that one aspect of being a professional is to make promises and to keep them. I made the promise to write 100 posts. In my mind I built this up to something so important that if I wouldn't finish it, I'll never be a professional. I now think this is shortsighted. Much more important than keeping promises made rashly, is to make promises worth keeping and to rethink your position upon finding new evidence (like the project you started to become a better writer is draining you creatively).

Is it reversible?
This depends on how you look at it. On the one hand, I'm breaking my streak. I won't reach the 100 posts. In that sense, it isn't reversible. But I don't think that's the right framing. I started posting daily because a strict deadline is a helpful tool to overcome perfectionism. If I'll start to miss this, I can just start doing it again. Writing for the streak in itself isn't worth doing in the first place.

Thinking about the decision with this framework lifted a weight from my shoulders. Before, even considering it felt like a failure. But through the lens of this framework the decision isn't consequential, reversible in all aspects that matter, and the project is draining me. With that one sentence, the path forward is obvious.