Stuck

A little over a year ago I erased my entire blog roll from the rightside navigation of this site.  It didn’t have any meaning anymore and was a constant source of anxiety for me.  People emailing “can I be on your blogroll?” really made me feel bad because of course I wanted to add them, but then I’d have to add everyone and then the blog roll has no meaning at all.  And heaven forbid I should take someone off – and they should notice!  I would feel like the lowest piece of garbage, it actually happened once.

So one day I just said, I’m tired of being stuck and I ripped the whole thing down.  Goodbye blogroll, hello more white space.  Now if I ever put something else there, its going to have to be important enough for me to really want to add it.

Seth has a great post up today about the benefits of starting over when you get stuck.  He highlights the difference between the two biggest search engines to make his point:

One approach to getting unstuck is the clean sheet of paper. Dictate that the speech before flight is going to change, that the menu will be redone, that the qualifications are going to start over, from zero.

Now, instead of needing an unanimous vote to remove something, merely demand that you need a passionate voice to add something.

For years, the Yahoo home page was stuck, with literally hundreds of links on it. No one could take a link off the page, because unanimous consent was impossible. Once Google decided to start with a completely blank page, a different approach was possible.

Love that.

What are you stuck on?  What’s something in your life or daily workflow that could use a good leveling down to zero?

Source:

Understanding Stuck (Seth’s Blog)