I ran an experiment at the beginning of February.

I closed my planning system and didn’t look at any of it for 48 hours. No peeking. No referencing. I just paid attention to what actually pulled at my thinking when nothing was prompting me.

Then, on Monday morning, before I opened anything, I wrote down what came back.

Nine items. That was all.

Not the dozens I thought I was managing. Nine things had enough gravity to return on their own. Some were obvious active projects with real momentum. Some surprised me and were tensions I’d been carrying but hadn’t named. And some things I’d been dutifully tracking for months simply didn’t show up. They just didn’t come back.

That gap is where the February issue of my Substack newsletter “Personal Strategy Compass” lives.

The core idea is what I’m calling “carryover as invisible commitment.” Most of our planning systems are designed for continuity. Goals carry forward. Projects stay open. To-do items migrate week to week. The assumption is that if something mattered last month, it matters this month. But that’s not how priorities actually work. Sometimes things become irrelevant not because we failed, but because the commitment was never fully ours to begin with. Or because it completed its natural life and we just never marked it as finished.

The problem is that most systems don’t let things disappear naturally. They require you to remove items affirmatively. That small friction means things linger long past their usefulness. You’re not choosing to keep them. You’re just not choosing to remove them.

The newsletter includes a simple 48-hour experiment I call the Disappearance Test. You can run this weekend as preparation for your next Personal Quarterly Offsite or as a simple stand-alone exercise. It won’t take extra time. It just requires you to temporarily stop maintaining your system and observe what actually demands your attention without it.

This is the fourth month of a pattern I didn’t plan in the newsletter. December was strategic ignoring. January was honoring mistakes. February is strategic disappearance. I keep arriving at the same door from different directions: clarity comes from subtraction, not addition.

The newsletter is free and open. Give it a read and try the experiment. I’ll report back in March on what survived.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.com is the home of the Kennedy Idea Propulsion Laboratory

Like this post? Buy me a coffee

DennisKennedy.Blog is part of the LexBlog network.