A few weeks ago I decided to kill one of my projects.

I’ve been running a little podcast called I Will Read To You since September of 2021, and in the past little-over-a-year I’ve recorded and published nearly 200 poems and essays (but mostly poems) from the public domain.

Killing a project, I’ve learned, can be almost as difficult as starting one.

It’s not easy to tell, for instance, if you’re getting rid of it for good, justifiable reasons or due to a failure of fortitude and resilience.

It’s tough to tell if the project in question is convertible into something else (if it might evolve into a bigger, better, more valuable version of itself with just a little more effort, a little more investment of time and energy).

You also never know who you might be upsetting, letting down, accidentally or incidentally ignoring; whose priorities you might be discounting in favor your own.

I personally try to think of this process as additive rather than subtractive.

I’m not pointlessly ripping a well-tended project from the ground, roots and all: I’m converting it into fuel for other ambitions.

I’m composting it so that the resources currently invested in its growth can instead be spent on other things.

Ideally those other things are more relevant to who I am, today, compared to the now-uprooted project.

In the case of I Will Read To You, I started the project as part of a larger effort to learn to properly use a new microphone I’d recently acquired, to exercise my jaw (and other speaking-related) muscles after surgery, and to explore types of writing that I’d always been interested in but which I’d never taken the time to really investigate properly.

These goals were important to me and I liked the idea of producing some kind of tangible output (podcast episodes) as part of that labor.

I also feel I’ve accomplished my goals, and then some: I was able to get my jaw back into fighting shape, create and refine an audio production routine that suits my mic setup, and I discovered (and started to cultivate) an ongoing passion for poetry I may never have otherwise clocked.

Now that these ambitions have been achieved, though, I’ve noted a few downsides to continued investment in this effort.

For one, I’ve got a few other projects (existing and impending) that would benefit from the additional time and energy I’d otherwise be investing in IWRTY.

For another, I accidentally built a negative incentive into this project.

Because I’m recording these poems for broadcast purposes, I can only legally record and release those in the public domain. That limits me to poems published in the early 20th century and before, and consequently—although I’ve loved the work I’ve read and shared—my education in this space is also somewhat limited because I’m incentivized to spend more of my time reading the sorts of things I can eventually convert into shareable content.

While I’ll be sunsetting the IWRTY podcast, then, I’ll continue to read poetry every day, and will be even more expansive in my exploration, no longer focusing on older work because reading newer poetry would be “wasted effort” in the context of my weekly deadline.

This was a relatively simple project-cull, then, but it’s not always so clean-cut. Several times I’ve considered killing off a project only to rediscover its value or repurpose it in some way, instead, after weeks of planning its demise.

In these cases, the composting process served as a new lens through which to view my efforts and outcomes—a project’s future utility and possibilities only apparent after I allowed myself to consider its absence.

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