I want a /quit page

I’ve been enjoying the About Ideas Now site, which collects the /about, /ideas, and /now pages from various personal websites so that you can search or browse through them and find people who share your interests.

The /now page was started by Derek Sivers, who proposed having a page of what one is working on now, rather than sending that information over and over in various catch up emails. There’s now a collection of Now pages, and the /someday page and the /ideas page, for things one might want to do someday or ideas one has.

I propose adding a /quit page.

(Maybe it could be called something else—I’ll get to that.)

But in addition to knowing what someone’s up to now and what they might want to do in the future, as well as what thoughts or accomplishments they’ve chosen to highlight on their personal site, I’m curious to know what someone has quit.

I’m curious about the things they thought they’d do indefinitely, or that they expected to bring to fruition, but that they decided to stop doing.

Maybe even projects or memberships that were very important to them at one time but that now feel like they are from a distant past self.

There’s so much survivorship bias. We see that people do a particular thing for ten or twenty years and get good at it, maybe become known for it. We believe that we need to do the same—just do something, keep doing it, achieve success.

But lots of people quit, and for many people, quitting is the right choice. They’re not as interested as they thought they were. They make a realistic assessment and realize they aren’t quite good enough to achieve the level of success they were going for. They move away. They want something else more.

The literature on optimal quitting is extremely interesting. The book Algorithms to Live By has a good discussion of it, which I won’t go into here. But here’s a quote to frame the question:

There is a particular set of problems that all people face, problems that are a direct result of the fact that our lives are carried out in finite space and time. What should we do, and leave undone, in a day or in a decade?

What did each of us expect to do, but ultimately leave undone?

Maybe the page should be /undone?

(Quitting, I noticed, is a word that has interesting associations with it. The first that comes to mind is quitting smoking, which is obviously considered a positive and virtuous decision. To “quit” in that context seems resolute and worthy of praise. What else might we quit? A job, I suppose. Maybe an extracurricular when we were in school. And this is why I think /quit just isn’t quite the right word—there’s not enough ambiguity to it. It suggests an affirmative decision, when many of the things we no longer do are by attrition. We may even think we mean to get to them “someday,” though they no longer hold enough energy to place themselves on our someday list.)

So, /undone perhaps? I like the sense of something frayed, of an untied shoelace, of items not properly tidied away. The things we thought we’d do, but left undone, either by choice or by circumstance.

Of the /now page, Sivers writes:

It’s a nice reminder for myself, when I’m feeling unfocused. A public declaration of priorities.

(If I’m doing something that’s not on my list, is it something I want to add, or something I want to stop?)

How would it feel to put something on the /undone page? Would it be a relief to finally remove it from our mental someday list?

What can we learn about ourselves or others from what we once did and no longer do?