What would you recommend in cases where there isn’t a single moment in time when one has given up? Most of my projects are inactive in the sense that I haven’t done much with them in a while (months or years), but also, they aren’t completely dead. I gradually lost interest in the project or prioritized doing other things, but there isn’t a sharp cutoff when that happened, and I might pick it up again. To give a concrete example, one of my blogs has a posting history that looks like this (numbers in parentheses indicate number of blog posts in that month):
October 2023 (4) May 2023 (2) April 2023 (2) August 2022 (1) November 2021 (1) September 2021 (2) July 2021 (1) April 2021 (1) March 2021 (1) February 2021 (1) November 2020 (2) October 2020 (1) September 2020 (3) August 2020 (3) July 2020 (3) June 2020 (12) May 2020 (25) April 2020 (28) March 2020 (23)
I think that’s probably the most common version of quietly fading. You do a bunch of work on something for a while, then a little less, then less, then it trickles out.
Most of the time I think that pattern is fine, because most of the time nobody is relying on you. I don’t have the numbers as handy, but my efforts to learn particular musical instruments or languages fit the same pattern your blog has without the 2023 revival. (Congratulations on that by the way!) Countless D&D campaigns I’ve been in would meet once a week for months, then twice a month, then once a month, then we start skipping months. It’s fine.
The right answer depends on the project, and I’m hampered in the post by trying to generalize too broadly. A work project in a busy office with tight deadlines? It might be worth telling your coworkers after two or three days of not touching a project. The failure condition is if they would assign someone else to work on the project if they knew you weren’t actively pushing forward on it. A personal blog written for your own writing practice? I don’t think you ever need to announce you’re giving up. It’s not that nobody cares about the personal blog, but most likely nobody is waiting around going “it’s important to me that the blog updates and I would do it myself if somebody had to, but I’m sure it’s all well in hand.”
In the post itself, I suggest checking if “I haven’t touched it in a month and ideally would have.” Some projects have months where there’s no reason to work on it, for instance a backyard garden probably doesn’t need much work in January. If you have a list of all the projects you’ve taken up, and you look at them on the first day of a new month and one of them hasn’t been touched at all, that’s the best trigger I’ve come up with. The central example of a project this post was written for is something like a once-a-year event lots of people like and would organize if they knew nobody else was doing it, but where the default assumption is usually that whoever did it last year will do it again this year.
What would you recommend in cases where there isn’t a single moment in time when one has given up? Most of my projects are inactive in the sense that I haven’t done much with them in a while (months or years), but also, they aren’t completely dead. I gradually lost interest in the project or prioritized doing other things, but there isn’t a sharp cutoff when that happened, and I might pick it up again. To give a concrete example, one of my blogs has a posting history that looks like this (numbers in parentheses indicate number of blog posts in that month):
I think that’s probably the most common version of quietly fading. You do a bunch of work on something for a while, then a little less, then less, then it trickles out.
Most of the time I think that pattern is fine, because most of the time nobody is relying on you. I don’t have the numbers as handy, but my efforts to learn particular musical instruments or languages fit the same pattern your blog has without the 2023 revival. (Congratulations on that by the way!) Countless D&D campaigns I’ve been in would meet once a week for months, then twice a month, then once a month, then we start skipping months. It’s fine.
The right answer depends on the project, and I’m hampered in the post by trying to generalize too broadly. A work project in a busy office with tight deadlines? It might be worth telling your coworkers after two or three days of not touching a project. The failure condition is if they would assign someone else to work on the project if they knew you weren’t actively pushing forward on it. A personal blog written for your own writing practice? I don’t think you ever need to announce you’re giving up. It’s not that nobody cares about the personal blog, but most likely nobody is waiting around going “it’s important to me that the blog updates and I would do it myself if somebody had to, but I’m sure it’s all well in hand.”
In the post itself, I suggest checking if “I haven’t touched it in a month and ideally would have.” Some projects have months where there’s no reason to work on it, for instance a backyard garden probably doesn’t need much work in January. If you have a list of all the projects you’ve taken up, and you look at them on the first day of a new month and one of them hasn’t been touched at all, that’s the best trigger I’ve come up with. The central example of a project this post was written for is something like a once-a-year event lots of people like and would organize if they knew nobody else was doing it, but where the default assumption is usually that whoever did it last year will do it again this year.