The two-year delete rule

The old site had pages I had genuinely forgotten existed. I cut about seventy percent of it, kept the work I still cared about, and rebuilt the rest in the cream brand to match the LinkedIn whitepaper. The new site loads faster and, honestly, says more by saying less.

I had convinced myself those pages were doing some kind of background work. They were not. The dataset I built that weekend -- what I cut, what I missed, what I did not -- taught me more about my own portfolio than three years of ”I should update the site.”

Apple was shipping fifteen overlapping desktop and laptop SKUs when Jobs returned. He drew a two-by-two grid -- consumer, pro, desktop, laptop -- and killed everything that did not fit one of four boxes. Two years later Apple was profitable again. The discipline of subtraction did most of the work.

I keep a short list of things I deliberately do not do -- projects, meetings, side-bets -- and I revisit it every quarter. The list is more valuable than my to-do list, because it is the thing actually protecting the work I genuinely want to compound.

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.