It's better not to continue everything
The best thing you can do is to hit pause and question everything you're currently doing
Do you ever feel like you’re drowning in an endless sea of features, projects, and meetings that nobody really needs or wants anymore?
We keep doing absolutely everything we’ve ever started, no matter what. A feature ships to production, a new project kicks off with enthusiasm, a meeting gets scheduled for the first time. And suddenly, almost magically, it becomes permanent and untouchable. We continue doing these things until people burn out completely or our systems collapse under the weight.
Why does this keep happening? Because continuation has become our deeply ingrained default mode of operation. We’ve invested so much time, energy, and resources already, so stopping feels like admitting failure or wasting everything we’ve done. It’s the classic sunk cost fallacy in action, and we fall for it every single time.
Stopping by default
But what if we could flip the script entirely? What if we made stopping the default instead?
Picture this scenario: every quarter or every year, everything pauses automatically without exception. Nothing continues on autopilot unless we actively and deliberately choose it. For each item we want to keep running, we need to build a completely fresh business case (or re-assess an existing one) and carefully evaluate whether it still genuinely deserves our precious time and limited resources. Only what truly matters and adds real value gets to move forward into the next period.
Some concrete examples:
That meeting series? It automatically ends every single quarter. If you want to continue having it, schedule a new series and clearly justify why it’s still valuable and necessary for the team.
That big strategic project everyone’s working on? It stops completely at year-end, regardless of its current state or momentum. Then you pause and ask the critical question: Is this still an actual priority for next year, or are we just continuing out of habit?
Product features that are already live? They get removed annually unless you can provide solid, data-driven evidence that users are actively using them and they’re delivering measurable value. (Yes, I know this sounds pretty radical and maybe even scary, but you could at least freeze all development in each area and only resume working on the ones you consciously and actively choose.)
The benefits of freeing ourselves from old priorities
This approach fundamentally frees us from sunk cost thinking that holds us back. We only invest our efforts in what makes sense going forward, not in what happened to make sense three years ago when the world was different.
This requires significant cultural change and won’t be easy. People naturally resist admitting that a project they’ve worked hard on adds no real value anymore. They genuinely hate the idea of abandoning all that sunk time and effort. Creating new business cases for everything constantly feels exhausting and like extra bureaucratic work nobody wants.
But just imagine the massive efficiency gains we would unlock: Regularly pause everything, actively and thoughtfully decide what continues based on current priorities, and stop everything else without guilt.
How many completely useless features, projects, and meetings could we eliminate this way?
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What I read
As usual, I will list some of the best articles I read on the Internet. I will keep a list of the best articles (currently >800) at https://www.digital-product-management.com. These are today’s picks:
PM Career Guide: A framework that makes career growth transparent, fair, and achievable.
Prompt Frameworks: Frameworks that create better prompts for LLMs.
Prompt Engineering Guides: A collection of Prompt Engineering Guide by OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, Google, etc.