A yearly look at what you keep doing

Nothing else will ever prompt this, so it has to be scheduled.

Since repeated actions do not ask for review, review has to be imposed from outside, and the simplest way is to make it itself a repeated action at a very low frequency. Once a year, or at some natural boundary such as a move or a change of role, sit down and list what actually recurs: daily, weekly, monthly. Write them out plainly, including the small ones and especially the ones that feel too obvious to mention. The listing alone does most of the work, because seeing an inventory is completely different from living inside it.

Then take each item and sort it into a small number of buckets. Still earning its place. Was useful, is not now. Never examined, unclear either way. Worth keeping but should be smaller. Resist the urge to act on everything at once. The purpose is visibility, and the natural consequence of visibility is that two or three items will be quietly obvious candidates for removal, while the rest can be left alone with a clearer conscience than before.

Removal deserves as much thought as addition, and it gets far less. There is a lot of enthusiasm about starting new practices and almost none about retiring old ones, so the total quantity only ever grows, and the day fills with maintenance for things nobody would begin today. A review that ends with fewer commitments than it started with is a successful review. That is a strange sentence and it is the most useful conclusion available on the subject.